Turning learning into recognition: the role of digital badges
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So you're welcome to introduce yourself in the chat. If you've been in one of these with me before, you know I always like to ask where you're dialing in from, and, of course, what the weather is where you are because I really love hearing that too. Amazing. I can see some chat already happening. Thank you.
Alright. We will get started because we do have a bit to cover off today, and hopefully, we can keep the time on this one. Really excited to be running a webinar with all of you here as part of our new and next series of webinars that we're going to be diving into some more detailed conversations and use cases that we wanna hear here in the region. So welcome to our turning learning into recognition, the role of digital badges webinar as part of our new and next series. We know that the traditional recognition systems often stop at the final grade in a lot of our context, and it leaves a lot of specific competencies and those micro wins from our students' learning journeys invisible when they really need it.
So today, we're gonna explore how digital badges turn into turn every verified learning outcome into a permanent, shareable form of recognition. And at the end of today's session, you're also gonna get to hear firsthand from some of our amazing customers and partners about what they've done in that space, turning those achievements into something that really resonates ideally with students and employers. If you haven't met me or seen me before, my name is Farrah King, and I'm our APAC global growth product marketing manager. I'm based here in Australia, and my focus is really on aligning Instructure's platforms and our growth with, of course, the needs of our region and making sure that the the platform does what you need it to do, but, course, that we are hearing what the region needs and making sure that reflects in our products as well. So we wanna ensure that we're talking when we're talking about success, we're always talking about that common language here in APAC and within the countries that we represent as well.
Firstly, an acknowledgment of country. We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we're meeting today, and we pay our respects to past to elders past, present, and emerging, and the enduring connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to country. I'm on Wairarung country, which is part of Kulin nation. If you happen to know where you're joining us from, the country that you're on, we'd love to see that as well represented in the chat for those of you dialing in from Australia. And, of course, I have an amazing panel of experts here with me today too.
I'd be remiss not to introduce them. We have Justin Stewart, our incredible solutions engineer, who's gonna be providing a live demo later in our session. And, of course, we have Keith Murphy and doctor Toby Gifford from the University of Sunshine Coast who have lived this transformation on the ground, and so I can't wait for you to hear from them later on in today's session. You'll get a three sixty view of badge implementation moving from the how to of the software component to, of course, the pedagogical impacts in the real world. So in terms of badges, there's a lot going on and credentialing more broadly.
We know now that the half life of professional skills is down to just five years, which is a really scary statistic given that the traditional four year degree cycle is under immense pressure to stay relevant with learners. We see employers shifting towards skills based hiring and, of course, more frequent career pivots from individuals as well, which requires that faster and more agile recognition. We know that these rapid changes are impacting you in a huge way and the programs that you're running as well as the workforce. As well, we're seeing a lot of talk about digital wallets taking a a a more prominent place in our conversations. Within the region, we see this already happening in Singapore, in Australia, in New Zealand, in South Korea, in Japan.
So here in region, there is a lot of conversations supporting this as well with the recognition and the digital wallet conversations that are starting to to become more prominent. And if we only focus on learner success, we're obviously missing an opportunity here to strengthen the institutional brand for you in a competitive market. Implementing skills aligned programs is a strategic move that will sharpen your institution's distinct value proposition to students. This approach will help transform the postsecondary experience for them as well into a more you know, rather than the onetime degree that they're looking for or a qualification provider. And this will turn it instead into that lifelong partnership and that lifelong learner journey that we're starting to see more prominently.
Just some data because we love to hear what's actually happening on the ground here, specifically in Australia and New Zealand. There is a staggering twenty seven point confidence gap in Australia and New Zealand between how educators and students are seeing these things, how well educators believe they're preparing students versus how students actually feel. So we need to talk about how to bridge this gap between the fifty three percent of confident educators and the twenty six percent of students who feel ready for the job market. Closing this gap through transparent credentialing will obviously build that trust and ensure that learners can see that immediate ROI on their education and learning experience. Now from your perspective, we know a number of administrators are often left asking how they can provide this clarity into the true value of an educational experience that can feel more and more abstract in this climate.
So today, we're gonna look at how to equip learners with that tangible, verifiable evidence of their abilities rather than just their list of courses. And we'll be answering a lot of these questions that allow you to move forward from just claiming value to proving value through these data backed credentials. Shifting the skills based model into into this is a huge curriculum change. We can appreciate that. It requires new technical and sometimes operational infrastructure, and we can provide learners with visibility into these potential skills by offering portable, secure, proof of competency to their employers ultimately.
And the infrastructure this creates provides an agile alignment between the academic output and, of course, the shifting labor demands of our markets. When we look across the APAC region, we're seeing real momentum behind digital credentialing and specifically digital badges. But the market is still developing here as I called out right at the start. So I mentioned a few countries where we've seen this starting to play out through government issued education certificates that are already sitting in this national digital wall wallet environment. So for example, New Zealand and Japan, they're already into this.
New Zealand has a government app that is already being positioned to hold accredited digital credentials, including qualifications, while Japan has also established a digital identity wallet framework that includes qualifications, and they're moving into the education space. Singapore is a super important market to watch in this space. It may not be a broad citizen wallet in the same sense, but it definitely has a strong national credential infrastructure through something they call OpenCerts and MySkillsFuture, which shows seriously digital credentials being embedded and being utilized in their workforce ecosystem. In Australia, we're slightly earlier in the journey here, but our direction is still very clear. There is a national strategy now in place.
The government is currently testing verifiable credentials through digital wallets and looking for the future of this space and where we can move to. So the key takeaway across our region is that digital badges and verifiable credentials are moving from being the innovation to the infrastructure now that learners and employers are looking for. Some countries are already live, some are scaling, and, of course, some are managing how this looks in their market and what that's gonna be going forward. Now if I pivot to the word credentials more broadly and and tie that back to badges, sometimes traditional transcripts can be a bit of a black box, unfortunately, and it really fails to satisfy the diverse needs of our learners, of the employers that they're dealing with, and, of course, you as their institution. The digital image on a screen is just a picture.
It lacks the value. It doesn't necessarily carry the weight of an institution's reputation that you have all worked really hard to build. We calculate the true credential value by combining that issuer authority, the meaning of the achievement, and, of course, the richness of the learner journey. So this helps ensure that when a recruiter, for example, looks at a badge, their perception of that is grounded in deep multifaceted records of success on behalf of that person. Now we have a little poll.
We like to keep things interactive as much as we can. I'm just gonna launch a poll that has a few questions we would love for you to answer just in terms of where you are with your credentialing thinking, where your institution might be, in terms of how this is looking for you. Please, we would love for you to take a moment and really just see where everyone is at. And, of course, you can ask things. We have q and a function in this session as well.
We're hoping, and I should have said this at the start, to keep the q and a specifically about this. And, of course, you are more than welcome to have social chats in the chat function. But please feel free to ask questions in the q and a. And, of course, we would love your responses to this poll, which I'll keep live and up and running for those of you that wanna take the time to fill that out. So let's spend a moment and call out something that I'm really clear on and and would love for you to be more aware about, and that's Parchment Digital Badges.
So we need to go beyond static transcripts and diplomas to prepare learners for a workforce that is demanding specific verified competency. Parchment Digital Badges allows you to map these complex pathways, and, of course, things like leadership development in a certificate can be a prerequisite along the way, which is really valuable. To better attract and engage learners, you can build that confidence through the visibility into digital credentials that are aligned with the in demand skills we're seeing playing out in the market and those career ready skills. This level of granularity granularity makes that learning growth more visible in real time, and it significantly increases employability even before a learner graduates, which is a really huge value add. Now on that, I'm gonna hand over to Justin who's actually gonna show us what this looks like and how this can work.
So I'm gonna hand over to Justin to walk us through Parchment digital badges and, of course, how they can be implemented and used effectively. So I will stop sharing my screen and hand over to you, Justin. Thanks, Farrah. I should be sharing my screen now. Hopefully, that's on the screen for you all.
Fantastic. Let's dive right into it. So today, we're gonna be showcasing how Canvas digital badges can help institutions recognize and verify skills in a way that goes beyond just your traditional grading. We're seeing a big shift towards skill based learning, whether it's employability skills, micro credentialing, or co curricular achievements. Digital badging gives you a way to capture, verify, and share those skills in a portable format.
So we'll talk a little bit about what they are at a high level before we dive into some of the functionality. So at a high level, digital badging is a way for us to create visual credentials, but more importantly, capture some of the key components that we want to represent as part of our learning journey and showcasing those achievements as we're working our way through our individual learning path pathways. We do this through the use of open badges. So open badges is an open standard. This means it's not locked to our ecosystem.
We can earn and achieve these badges in a variety of sources, and it allows us to capture some of the important parts of evidence of our learning. We can capture information such as the issuer details, who's offering, who's credentialing these items, the learner themselves, what they did to earn those specific achievements, as well as those alignments and evidence all bundled together within one package. So as Farrah covered, it's more than just an image. This is a series of metadata breaking down that learner's achievement in a shareable format that's gonna follow them for the lifetime of their learning. Really powerful.
So now we're gonna come into the product itself and take a look at how we can deliver these micro credentials, offer them, and send them through to our users. So from the teaching perspective, within your Canvas courses themselves, Parchment digital badges will appear as a sidebar item. So here under Parchment badges, and this is gonna allow us to both deliver and create badges as well as manage those badges within our environment for our users. So at a high level, we can track the group progress of our class and cohorts and see who's earning what within our ecosystem, which badges are being earned over time, and the individual learners' progress as they're earning more and more requirements within our specific course. These badges themselves can be tied to the completion of either the entire course or subparts of that component, so finishing particular modules or assessments to different and varying levels of degree.
Once we've set those up, we can also start to gamify these elements, creating leaderboards, attaching points to these badges, and encouraging our users to potentially take up extracurricular nonformal assessment parts of a course to earn those badges and earn those top slots in your class. Here, we've set up some pseudonyms. So users actually won't see their names. They'll see each other's, pseudonyms through here, and they can compete for those top slots in the leaderboards based off the points they're earning throughout their cohorts and their classes. Setting up the badges is incredibly easy.
We can simply configure badges directly through the front end interface, either creating brand new badges or allocating existing badges to components of our course completion. So we can target either the overall course grades. So let's say I want to give a gold trophy, bronze trophy to users who finish the course overall either to a certain standard, so a percentage above eighty percent, or simply by completing the course and automatically grant them those badges themselves. We could also tie to module completion. So if we have particular elements of our class, week one, week two, module one, module two, we can target those as part of those deliveries and offer badges according to the completion of those items as well.
So while we have our formal standardized assessments around our course grades, we can also target the collective programmatic content and then attribute those to our students as well. The last way we can attribute is based off our assessments. So automatically based off how our students are are scoring in particular quizzes, particular assessment or elements within our course designs, we can offer again those badges, trophies targeting the specific completion of those items or automatically to a degree of success. So for example, when a student receives a satisfactory within this quiz, we're automatically gonna be granting them those badges. So this allows us a central control of our course, of our credentialing, puts the power in the hands of the teachers, and lets them control exactly how they want their course to play out.
And then as they're running the course, students are automatically collecting these badges. They're gonna centralize all within their backpacks, and they're going to be able to automatically earn these without that extra intervention needed by the teaching staff there as well. So really quite powerful. Once we've earned a badge as a student, this is where we start to be able to showcase, collect, and send these externally. We have an internal system known as a backpack.
This is gonna collect within Canvas through a backpack side tab. It's gonna allow us to show what we've earned, when we've earned them, and which organization organization granted us those components. If I open up our workplace numeracy badge here, we could view a series of different pieces of metadata attached directly to this badge. So we have our offering institution by our demo environment. This would be your institution and your institution's reputation, which is offering and credentialing this item.
We have an issue date as well as a description. So what did we do to earn this badge? What did we achieve, and what was the process to get to this point in time? We can also attach additional, criterias and tagging here if we choose to as well. So we can bake a whole series of metadata, including skill alignments to these badges as well. Opening these skill alignments is actually gonna take us to Indeed and showcase us some of the jobs that might require that skill for helping our learners out even further. But once we have one of these badges, we wanna be able to share this.
We wanna be to send this to others within an institution. So this is where we can enable this from public to from private to public, and then we can start to share this link externally. So either as a share URL, which is going to create a public share link where I can send this the information out to an external party, or I can attach this to a series of different socials. If I want to attach to LinkedIn, to Facebook, to x, I can send these as tiles into those locations and start to feed your users back into the flow, back to your organization as they're sending these out to jobs and industry. Once we've created these share links, they exist beyond your Canvas institution.
These follow your user around for their lifetime as they're moving through different life states from early learning to adult education through to their life in in, day to day jobs. They're gonna be collecting these badges, taking them with them, and using them multiple times throughout their careers and their lives. So these public share links that we have are gonna be attached to their personal accounts, and they can share them whenever they need and wherever they need. But, again, these are gonna feed users back to your organization. They're gonna feed them back to the learning that was attributed.
And if you're using Canvas catalog, you can actually feed them directly back to your listings themselves. So if you are having a store fronting option attached to Canvas, you wanna feed your users back through the badges to purchase your courses, they can centralize that all within one place here as well. Incredibly powerful. But coming back to our badge flow, we can start to set up and configure things at an administrator level as well. So beyond the ability to offer singular centralized badges, we can also attach these badges to pathways.
We can start to showcase our users' journey as they're earning multiple badges, stacking those requirements as they earn from micro achievements to those macro outcomes that they're trying to work towards. And we can visualize this process for them as well as allow our teaching staff to track those individual students and where they're at in their individual pathways. So this opens the doors for a whole series of different types of badging solutions. We can offer macro achievements when they're finishing qualifications all the way to those minor achievements of fantastic with going a leg up, going an extra mile within a classroom, and give them that acknowledgment directly. So these collective badges are work work They collect together based off prerequisites so we can tie the sequence of completion that a user needs to complete.
And because we're tying these towards our open badging standard, it also means that we can bring in badges from external sources. So our institution may not offer the language literacy numeracy check, working with children's check, or police check. But if these organizations are offering open badge standards, we can connect them to our pathways, and we can showcase how prerequisites from other organizations are feeding into our organization and then feeding onwards into industry, really tying that package together in a neat bar. Really fantastic way to do this. So we're looking at our early career childhood careers badge here, but we can tie together a series of different requirements around our deliveries, whether this is higher education, early learning, RTO environments, and really start to show our users and motivate our users to continue and finish what they've started throughout their learning journey.
Last thing I wanna cover is a little bit from our administrator side. So in our back end system supporting your admin teams, we can do a series of different things. Beyond the ability for us to be able to automatically offer badges, we can group and bulk award badges to either existing students who have previously completed requirements so we can retrospectively issue badges. We can also revoke badges if necessary, set end limits. So let's say, is only valid for twelve months.
And then we can start to do some more fancy things within the badge itself, like offering certificates branded by our organization and really start to customize and white label this approach to really represent your brand and your image within the badge approach itself. Badges are incredibly easy to set up and create as we can simply upload badge images, our our general information around what was earned, what was the achievement type, and the criterias, and then they're gonna feed automatically within your Canvas infrastructure where you can start to say these badges align with these deliveries and then automate that process end to end. That's a basic overview of our badging approach. Do we have any questions in the q and a that we wanted to jump in before we redirect back to the group? We do have a few. I think you've actually answered a number of them, but, I mean, you're the expert, and I would love to hear your explanation on some of these things.
So I will revisit a few questions. I think you did answer these. The first question we had was from Anna Marie, and it was how the system works for RTOs in terms of recognizing partial completion. So I think just a moment ago, you were showing how to stack towards, certain skill sets or a group of units within a qualification. Can you issue something like a digital badge alongside a statement of attainment? Absolutely.
So we can granularly break these down to whatever degree you need. Because we can attach to individual courses, modules, or individual assessments, we have a lot of flexibility in terms of how we wanna offer these badges, and we can even separate this approach from Canvas entirely if you need. If you want to attribute users to specific badges separate to the LMS, you can grant them those badges manually as an administrator as well. So if you did want to give extra achievements, those gold trophies for your students who are potentially top performers, wanna separate that from the LMS and give them those individual attributes that they can carry with them over their different life journey, then you can do that manually as well. So a lot of flexibility in terms of how we wanna utilize the system to both grant those achievements and use our reputation as an organization to offer that to our students as well.
Awesome. Thanks, Justin. The next question we had again, I think you touched on this a bit, but if you wouldn't mind elaborating. In terms of badges and credentials and the the assigning of skills or those unique identifiers, is there a way for those unique identifiers and employers to validate some of that, or how does that work when skills are assigned? So they're assigned at a high level as the badges are created. So my recommendation there would to be to have your learning design teams create those badges aligned to those skills ahead of time, and then they're attributed to evidence of those throughout the Canvas course creations.
So whether that's an assessment, a module, or individual components of the course that's showcasing that delivery, we're then aligning it to the skills similar as we would to an outcomes or a curriculum layer, as we're aligning those individual, delivery items to the badge and then the evidence attached to there as well. Awesome. Thank you. And the next question, you were touching just before on how to incorporate other badges as well. Do they have to be part of open badges, or are there other kinds of certificates or institutions where you can import badges from? They do need to be open badges.
So if they are open badges from external organizations, you can actually create sub issuers within your own organization if you want to white label that approach. So that's one option is to have essentially a division of your infrastructure dedicated to offering those on the behalf of others. Or if they've already granted an open badge, they can simply import that into their Canvas part their Parchment digital badges, backpack and then showcase that over time. So, unfortunately, it doesn't need to be open badge standards as that's an open community standard allowing everything to plug and play nicely together. Cool.
Thank you. And the last one and, again, I think you touched on this when we were talking about pathways and stacking. The question was, can you set it up that participants in a course receive a certificate of completion for a minimum amount of activities, but that they can then receive additional badges for bonus activities or bonus modules? Absolutely. We took a look at that through pathways. So we might have a critical pathway here for completion towards our early childhood careers, but we might have a completely separate pathway, which is those elective components.
Did you engage with the community? Did you engage with student groups that may not be that graded formal assessment, but we still want to give those students those achievements so we can stack multiple different pathways within a singular course. We actually saw that in this course here where we can have multiple pathways connected, and those pathways might align to wider qualification sets, or they could be as just a nice to have to track use your students' progress and to track those micro achievements that might be separate to their formal grades, but we still wanna acknowledge those achievements for our students. Perfect. Amazing. See, I knew you would answer those far better than I could.
Thank you for doing that. Appreciate it. We are gonna flick back now. Thank you, Justin, for the amazing demo. I hope that gives you a little more insight into the actual functionality and even just some of those little use cases that we know happen in higher ed in our RTO spaces and how there's flexibility and how you might wanna issue your badges.
Now what we're gonna do is move on to some more interesting information. So we know at the moment, the data in the world does not really replace a lived experience. So it's been well and good for Justin and I to talk to you about all of these great things. But the experience that an institution has firsthand and how they've successfully implemented a badge program is something that we're really keen to share today. And this is why we've invited the team from University of Sunshine Coast to share how they embedded these tools into their design and innovation curriculum at USC.
I'm so grateful that Keith and Toby could be here today because I think their insights will really show you how to move from that strategic planning plea piece into the living, breathing ecosystem of recognition that we know will truly serve your campus community and your learners. So please welcome Keith Murphin and doctor Toby Gifford. They are kindly on the call with us. And so I think just really broadly, tell us what you did. Tell us about your journey using Parchment and Digital Badges at USC.
Thanks, Farrah. Yeah. So I think I'll let Toby explain just a little bit more about the course that we were we were running and where this journey started for us. And then I think maybe once we've kind of got a context on it, we can just talk a bit little bit about the practical practical elements. You know, when we went and started this journey, we weren't offering micro credentials.
We were just in an exploration phase. We didn't have any sorts of badging, and we can maybe just talk a little bit about some of the the things we had to think about in those challenges. So I might just hand over to Toby first of all just to maybe introduce what we were doing and what the course was, and then we can talk about some of the the things that came out of it. Thanks, Keith, and thanks, Farrah. So I'm Toby Gifford from the University of the Sunshine Coast, lecturer in design.
And so a couple of years ago, the Commonwealth government started a sort of a pilot scheme in micro credentials. So they were interested in exploring micro credentials as a alternative to the kind of full degrees and diplomas that we've got, you know, for all the reasons that we've been talking about today. They there's also some appetite in the government for seeing this as a new approach to training and skills. And so they approved twenty micro credentials around Australia, I believe, and we applied to set up a micro credential in digital accessibility. So digital accessibility is about making sure that digital interfaces like websites and documents and communications are accessible to people with disability so you can imagine if you are blind then a lot of websites and so on are challenging to use.
And, of course, there's lots of tools that one can make can use to make these websites more accessible for people with a range of conditions, such as not being able to see or not being able to use a keyboard and so on. And so this is a kind of an important thing for us to do as a country, as a society, and there was a lack of training in this available, and so we identified this as a really good place to you know, a good opportunity for a micro credential. And I guess of particular interest was we really wanted to target people who were in full time work, essentially, people who were in positions where they were kind of at the coalface either as, you know, marketing managers for companies or in government or web designers in in such positions. And, you know, people who are not gonna stop and do another full time degree because they're already in work, and they just really did need some skills up training. So it seemed like a a perfect opportunity for this goal.
And we partnered with the Centre for Accessibility Australia, who are the kind of peak body in digital accessibility, and put in put in a proposal for this micro credential, which was approved. And so that's fantastic, and we've been rolling that out for a few deliveries now. And, of course, we wanted to, you know, have some kind of qualification attached to this. And because this is a pilot project of the government, it's not really it's all new, basically. So there's a established TEQSA framework for degrees and certificates and diplomas and so on, whereas there isn't really for micro credentials, or at least if there is, it's kind of influx and new.
And so, you know, the question is how do we how do how do people advertise the fact that they've completed this? How do we how do we recognize people's completion of this skilled upskilling in a in a way that's useful to them? And so we thought that the digital badges was a great way to do this. And so, I mean, interestingly, part of the the way the course was developed, as I said, was in conjunction with a peak body for digital accessibility, and they had already received some grant funding to do some development, and that was kind of leveraged in this. And part of that grant funding, know, part of the conditions of that was that some aspect of this was open to the public. So whilst we were developing a course, which is a course that students take at our university, we also made a portion of that course available free. And it's up there in quite a lot of people.
So we've had about a thousand people look at this free course now and about sixty going through the full micro credential. And so there was a bit of a question for us at first. We thought these Parchment digital badges or or Canvas badges as they were called at the time would be a great way to attach a qualification to this. And there was a a bit of a, I guess, decision to be made as to whether we would make this available to people who undertook this free course or whether to keep it restricted to the kind of micro credential. And we ended up deciding to keep it restricted to the micro credential, I mean, partially because the free course is totally open and we don't really have control and we don't want to control how many people take it, the more the merrier, really.
And, you know, there is a cost, not not massive, but there is some cost associated, or there's a limited number of licenses that we have for these badges, and so we couldn't really attach them to those without, you know, thinking about the scaling of it. But, secondly, we really did want this badge to hold value and the sense that, you know, this was a serious achievement. And so we decided in the end to restrict the issuance of this badge that you can see on the screen to people who've gone through this, what actually is quite an intensive micro credential. So that's kind of the context of the of the badging. And as I said, we've had a number of learners be issued with this badge so far.
And I've have found probably that certainly, students were very interested in the badge. Like, it it held it did seem to hold genuine value for them. And I think probably the most common place where students would like wanted to display their badge was on LinkedIn. I wonder, Farrah, if you could or whoever's running the slides could skip to the next slide there. Thank you.
So this is a example student that has put their badge on their LinkedIn site, And, you know, look, it's great. So it's great for them, but it's also great for us because now, you know, we're visible. The the university is visible on their LinkedIn profile in a way that, you know, is not really the case with, like, a degree on a piece of paper. Like, spinning on their wall, and they walk in the office. But yep.
And, Toby, I went and had a look at the stats as well afterwards, and I think there were sixty seven profiles that this has been attached to and a few extra shares in LinkedIn. And as you call out, it's it's ninety ninety odd percent LinkedIn and only a couple on Facebook or or other sources. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
So yeah. Look. I think in in that perspective, it's it's all been a very positive experience and one that's worked well for the use case we've had. Now that's not to say that it hasn't been without some wrinkles. I was I was gonna ask about that.
The intent sounds amazing. It sounds like the uptake's been great, but I guess, you know, bureaucracy is a is a huge thing in universities. And so I'm keen, and I know that people attending were keen to understand. What were some of the challenges you ran into or the things that you didn't foresee that you suddenly went, oh, we've gotta think about this? Well, there were lots there were quite a lot of technical ones to start, I think. You know, we we this was new for us.
We didn't have a place to offer offer badging or, you know, even a platform to to offer these micro credentials on on it first. So there was a lot of that sort of figuring things out, like, are we actually gonna deliver it? How do we get these users into Canvas? How do we how do we structure even, you know, those pages? And, you know, you can see, like, how do we structure the design of the issuers? So who gets an issuer? What's a formal issuer? You know, there was lots of conversations with our marketing team to make sure that that design of the badge would work for this one. And then also, you know, what happens if we offer many of these? You know, would we need to have a version that indicated this one maybe belong to the school of business, or do we need ones for health? And so there was a lot of discussion about the hierarchy of badging and that recognition. So I would say working with your marketing team is is quite important because I think that is what this is, is a lot of marketing. And then as as Toby mentioned, you know, the value of these issue is, you know, it's gotta mean something.
You don't wanna give you know, hand them out for everything. But then other conversations, you know, obviously, we use my equals, and I I know there's now that merger that's happened. So so maybe in a future state, this will will be one with our use of MyEquals. But, you know, there was discussion, do we upload these into MyEquals? And even in that getting our users in, you know, a lot of these users are in a I wanna come in. I wanna buy I wanna enroll and pay for something in in in this space.
I think these are fully fledged students because of the government grant. So so they went through a standard enrollment process. But if you were offering them for the free courses and for for others, there are all these challenges in that model that we had to discuss. So so, yeah, it was kinda it was kinda interesting. And I think, Toby, you and I, we were just reflecting on it in prep for this that, you know, even deciding on some of those skills.
I can remember a conversation where we sat there and looking at so what skills are we is this is this representing? And or even how long is it valid? I think it was interesting to see the five year statistic that you called out of the half life because we were sat there going, well, how long is this valid for? And I think we went for the five years. It's actually how long these badges are valid. But these are all questions where there wasn't a lot of information or precedence for us to to make these decisions on. I have a may not controversial, but now that you have hindsight in your favor and you've had some great outcomes and good uptake, if if you could do this again, what what do you wish you knew? I'm not sure. I feel like we haven't done this again very quickly since.
I think I think the whole micro credentials and the use of catalog for us is still quite challenging. I think we found that, you know, our our standard process and our standard systems do not lend themselves to MicroCreds and these badges neatly. So it just felt like every time you had a question, you you didn't get an answer, you got three more questions. And so our biggest challenge really on on rolling this out mass is how do we adjust and how do we streamline all of that process. So I do think from this individual one, this was very successful.
It was a really good choice, I think. It was it was very apt, and I think we should progress with a few more in in this vein. But the management and and and then yeah. All the process that goes with this was was quite challenging. So I wish we'd had things a little bit more advanced in our process to be able to handle handle some of these.
Yeah. From my perspective, I guess just the reality of having a short course but which we had actual students for, which meant that they got issued, you know, Uni SC emails, which they needed to do to get into Canvas through this particular portal. But the fact that they weren't attached to a wider program so that quite quickly after the micro credential finished, which was, you know, very short, those that access was not available to them and, you know, they hadn't all collected their badges, and they didn't really have a backpack. And there was a bit of manual quite a bit of manual follow-up on my behalf just trying to figure out how to how to get them their badge, basically, just because we hadn't you know, we we didn't really have the system set up for it. And, yeah, I guess just on on tiny things, just, you know, a bit of knowledge ahead of time about the design of things.
So, again, I don't think I still don't quite sure I know the answer to this. But if you if you were able flip to that slide again, Farrah The LinkedIn one? The LinkedIn one. The I'd I'm not actually sure whether this is to do with the way the student has set this up or whether this is how LinkedIn works, but our design gets cut off in that LinkedIn view. And so maybe we needed to use a a smaller image, or maybe I just need to tell students how to embed it better. I'm not sure.
But, you know, these are the little things that, you know, until you actually go to do one of these, you you sort of you don't encounter until it yeah. Yeah. Definitely. There's also been a question in the chat if if able to share a bit more on the planning side of things and your strategy that that you use to approach. Obviously, this was initiated from the government funding that is that the Australian government rolled out.
How did you engage with your cocreators? What how did you yep. The planning part of things. For the course too? Oh, and and and to the badge. Well, for the course itself, just the nature of the material is, you know, nothing nothing about us without us is the catch cry for most disability advocacy networks. So the the whole course was codesigned quite strongly with the industry peak body.
So they have a lot of people with lived experience of disability who were there from the beginning in course design and, you know, auditing the course and so on. From their perspective on the badging, I I don't think they really had a perspective on that. And in terms of our planning of this, I I'm not Keith might be a better place to answer that. I I just think it was there, and we thought it would be good. And I know we talked a little bit even about the choice of skills, and you'd sort of alluded to this before too.
Yeah. To be perfectly honest, I think that we didn't plan. We came to the point where we went to try and put these badges together and realized that that was part of it, and so we did it. And I I guess that was, I guess, another point of potential friction is that I mean, yes, the micro credential program that the government will come and put forward has a concept of skills, but the badging system has a concept of skills, and they're not the same taxonomy. I mean, they're related, but they're one of them's from the company, Indeed, and one of them's from the Australian government.
So, you know, it wasn't that hard to kind of match them eventually, but, you know, again, that wasn't necessarily planned. That was just discovered along the way. That's fair. Keith, did you have anything you wanted to add in that in terms of the planning side? No. I was just saying we were actually running quite a big micro credentials project that spanned quite a few years to kind of explore all of these challenges.
And this one just kind of the timing of this was really, really good to to actually execute one, and this was the first one we executed. So there was a whole structured, you know, investigation. You know, we were obviously liaising with a lot of other universities, and our central learning and teaching team were kind of doing a lot of that understanding on how, you know, the curriculum might be structured, how this fits in our curriculum management system, and how those flows will work. But it was a a long project that proved that it could be done, but it did leave a legacy of a lot of manual process for that enrollment and for those integrations that we're we're still cleaning up now. And we have a few other micro credentials that are sort of on the on the path that hopefully, we will then improve the process a little bit more as we go for the next round.
Nice. That answered I was gonna ask what you're thinking next, so that's really helpful to hear. Appreciate that. Well, we appreciate the panel, and thank you, Toby and Keith, for sharing your thoughts. And more importantly, what what how it actually went for you in terms of the implementation.
I think that's really key to hear the journey and and really what goes into that work. If there are any other questions, please feel free to pop them in the chat or in our q and a function. We can get those answered. But we are tracking a bit ahead of schedule, so we might be able to wrap up a bit sooner rather than later. I think and I'm gonna put Toby and Keith on the spot a little bit.
But if you had to, I guess, maybe summarize a a nudge or just something to say to people who are considering implementing badging a lot in within their institution, what would be, you know, your one bit of advice or your one little barbecue chat to go? This is what I need you to to know before you go down this path. Look, I think understanding what it is you're getting is the interesting piece. You know, I think I think a a lot of you know, we had a lot of academics approach us with ideas of saying, oh, we wanna do this thing. It's a micro credential. And, you know, this is the reason we wanna do it.
But I think just be clear and understand, you know, is this a marketing exercise? Is this a skills gap challenge? And the costing model that you'd need to use for this is really challenging in your broader model. So I would just say, you know, understand why or or when you're working through this process is understand really what the driver is for you and then what all of those costs involve because it it it was a lot of work for for what it eventuated, and I think we we learned a lot from it. But if we were relying it just as an income stream, it would be quite a a different conversation, I think. That is excellent advice. Appreciate that.
Toby, how about you? Look. I I mean, to sort of put a positive spin on things, I think my advice is go for it. They're great. Nice. I wasn't quite as involved in the painful discoveries, I suppose, or just the, you know, the tricky tricky technical aspects of it.
So, you know, definitely listen to Keith there. But at the end of the day, I think it's been very valuable and it has worked out well for us. Yeah. And it sounds like the starting small approach was really effective because, you know, to both of your points, you were able to iron out a lot of things. It surfaced a lot of things that you didn't realize were gonna come up, but starting small sounded like a really good way forward.
Amazing. Well, I think we're finished the session a little bit earlier than planned, which is great. We love being able to do that. There are a couple more questions in the q and a. Jackie, we can probably pick that up with you afterwards in terms of how to get Canvas and Badges speaking to each other.
That was something that Justin touched on, and it will be back in the recording when we share that as well. And, Nicola, there was a question about cost considerations. I'm not sure if you're asking specifically about pricing or if this was a question, you know, more broadly about the the the work that goes into the implementation from an institution, but we can certainly pick that up with you separately as well. Otherwise, thank you for choosing to spend your time with us this afternoon or this morning, wherever you are dialing in from. Always a great opportunity to get together as colleagues in this space and really hear about the great things that are happening and really what's driving us as we move forward in a really interesting time in the education landscape.
Thank you again. We will be sharing a recording, shortly afterwards in a follow-up email. So thank you for your time, and it was lovely to see you all. Thanks, everyone.
So you're welcome to introduce yourself in the chat. If you've been in one of these with me before, you know I always like to ask where you're dialing in from, and, of course, what the weather is where you are because I really love hearing that too. Amazing. I can see some chat already happening. Thank you.
Alright. We will get started because we do have a bit to cover off today, and hopefully, we can keep the time on this one. Really excited to be running a webinar with all of you here as part of our new and next series of webinars that we're going to be diving into some more detailed conversations and use cases that we wanna hear here in the region. So welcome to our turning learning into recognition, the role of digital badges webinar as part of our new and next series. We know that the traditional recognition systems often stop at the final grade in a lot of our context, and it leaves a lot of specific competencies and those micro wins from our students' learning journeys invisible when they really need it.
So today, we're gonna explore how digital badges turn into turn every verified learning outcome into a permanent, shareable form of recognition. And at the end of today's session, you're also gonna get to hear firsthand from some of our amazing customers and partners about what they've done in that space, turning those achievements into something that really resonates ideally with students and employers. If you haven't met me or seen me before, my name is Farrah King, and I'm our APAC global growth product marketing manager. I'm based here in Australia, and my focus is really on aligning Instructure's platforms and our growth with, of course, the needs of our region and making sure that the the platform does what you need it to do, but, course, that we are hearing what the region needs and making sure that reflects in our products as well. So we wanna ensure that we're talking when we're talking about success, we're always talking about that common language here in APAC and within the countries that we represent as well.
Firstly, an acknowledgment of country. We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we're meeting today, and we pay our respects to past to elders past, present, and emerging, and the enduring connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to country. I'm on Wairarung country, which is part of Kulin nation. If you happen to know where you're joining us from, the country that you're on, we'd love to see that as well represented in the chat for those of you dialing in from Australia. And, of course, I have an amazing panel of experts here with me today too.
I'd be remiss not to introduce them. We have Justin Stewart, our incredible solutions engineer, who's gonna be providing a live demo later in our session. And, of course, we have Keith Murphy and doctor Toby Gifford from the University of Sunshine Coast who have lived this transformation on the ground, and so I can't wait for you to hear from them later on in today's session. You'll get a three sixty view of badge implementation moving from the how to of the software component to, of course, the pedagogical impacts in the real world. So in terms of badges, there's a lot going on and credentialing more broadly.
We know now that the half life of professional skills is down to just five years, which is a really scary statistic given that the traditional four year degree cycle is under immense pressure to stay relevant with learners. We see employers shifting towards skills based hiring and, of course, more frequent career pivots from individuals as well, which requires that faster and more agile recognition. We know that these rapid changes are impacting you in a huge way and the programs that you're running as well as the workforce. As well, we're seeing a lot of talk about digital wallets taking a a a more prominent place in our conversations. Within the region, we see this already happening in Singapore, in Australia, in New Zealand, in South Korea, in Japan.
So here in region, there is a lot of conversations supporting this as well with the recognition and the digital wallet conversations that are starting to to become more prominent. And if we only focus on learner success, we're obviously missing an opportunity here to strengthen the institutional brand for you in a competitive market. Implementing skills aligned programs is a strategic move that will sharpen your institution's distinct value proposition to students. This approach will help transform the postsecondary experience for them as well into a more you know, rather than the onetime degree that they're looking for or a qualification provider. And this will turn it instead into that lifelong partnership and that lifelong learner journey that we're starting to see more prominently.
Just some data because we love to hear what's actually happening on the ground here, specifically in Australia and New Zealand. There is a staggering twenty seven point confidence gap in Australia and New Zealand between how educators and students are seeing these things, how well educators believe they're preparing students versus how students actually feel. So we need to talk about how to bridge this gap between the fifty three percent of confident educators and the twenty six percent of students who feel ready for the job market. Closing this gap through transparent credentialing will obviously build that trust and ensure that learners can see that immediate ROI on their education and learning experience. Now from your perspective, we know a number of administrators are often left asking how they can provide this clarity into the true value of an educational experience that can feel more and more abstract in this climate.
So today, we're gonna look at how to equip learners with that tangible, verifiable evidence of their abilities rather than just their list of courses. And we'll be answering a lot of these questions that allow you to move forward from just claiming value to proving value through these data backed credentials. Shifting the skills based model into into this is a huge curriculum change. We can appreciate that. It requires new technical and sometimes operational infrastructure, and we can provide learners with visibility into these potential skills by offering portable, secure, proof of competency to their employers ultimately.
And the infrastructure this creates provides an agile alignment between the academic output and, of course, the shifting labor demands of our markets. When we look across the APAC region, we're seeing real momentum behind digital credentialing and specifically digital badges. But the market is still developing here as I called out right at the start. So I mentioned a few countries where we've seen this starting to play out through government issued education certificates that are already sitting in this national digital wall wallet environment. So for example, New Zealand and Japan, they're already into this.
New Zealand has a government app that is already being positioned to hold accredited digital credentials, including qualifications, while Japan has also established a digital identity wallet framework that includes qualifications, and they're moving into the education space. Singapore is a super important market to watch in this space. It may not be a broad citizen wallet in the same sense, but it definitely has a strong national credential infrastructure through something they call OpenCerts and MySkillsFuture, which shows seriously digital credentials being embedded and being utilized in their workforce ecosystem. In Australia, we're slightly earlier in the journey here, but our direction is still very clear. There is a national strategy now in place.
The government is currently testing verifiable credentials through digital wallets and looking for the future of this space and where we can move to. So the key takeaway across our region is that digital badges and verifiable credentials are moving from being the innovation to the infrastructure now that learners and employers are looking for. Some countries are already live, some are scaling, and, of course, some are managing how this looks in their market and what that's gonna be going forward. Now if I pivot to the word credentials more broadly and and tie that back to badges, sometimes traditional transcripts can be a bit of a black box, unfortunately, and it really fails to satisfy the diverse needs of our learners, of the employers that they're dealing with, and, of course, you as their institution. The digital image on a screen is just a picture.
It lacks the value. It doesn't necessarily carry the weight of an institution's reputation that you have all worked really hard to build. We calculate the true credential value by combining that issuer authority, the meaning of the achievement, and, of course, the richness of the learner journey. So this helps ensure that when a recruiter, for example, looks at a badge, their perception of that is grounded in deep multifaceted records of success on behalf of that person. Now we have a little poll.
We like to keep things interactive as much as we can. I'm just gonna launch a poll that has a few questions we would love for you to answer just in terms of where you are with your credentialing thinking, where your institution might be, in terms of how this is looking for you. Please, we would love for you to take a moment and really just see where everyone is at. And, of course, you can ask things. We have q and a function in this session as well.
We're hoping, and I should have said this at the start, to keep the q and a specifically about this. And, of course, you are more than welcome to have social chats in the chat function. But please feel free to ask questions in the q and a. And, of course, we would love your responses to this poll, which I'll keep live and up and running for those of you that wanna take the time to fill that out. So let's spend a moment and call out something that I'm really clear on and and would love for you to be more aware about, and that's Parchment Digital Badges.
So we need to go beyond static transcripts and diplomas to prepare learners for a workforce that is demanding specific verified competency. Parchment Digital Badges allows you to map these complex pathways, and, of course, things like leadership development in a certificate can be a prerequisite along the way, which is really valuable. To better attract and engage learners, you can build that confidence through the visibility into digital credentials that are aligned with the in demand skills we're seeing playing out in the market and those career ready skills. This level of granularity granularity makes that learning growth more visible in real time, and it significantly increases employability even before a learner graduates, which is a really huge value add. Now on that, I'm gonna hand over to Justin who's actually gonna show us what this looks like and how this can work.
So I'm gonna hand over to Justin to walk us through Parchment digital badges and, of course, how they can be implemented and used effectively. So I will stop sharing my screen and hand over to you, Justin. Thanks, Farrah. I should be sharing my screen now. Hopefully, that's on the screen for you all.
Fantastic. Let's dive right into it. So today, we're gonna be showcasing how Canvas digital badges can help institutions recognize and verify skills in a way that goes beyond just your traditional grading. We're seeing a big shift towards skill based learning, whether it's employability skills, micro credentialing, or co curricular achievements. Digital badging gives you a way to capture, verify, and share those skills in a portable format.
So we'll talk a little bit about what they are at a high level before we dive into some of the functionality. So at a high level, digital badging is a way for us to create visual credentials, but more importantly, capture some of the key components that we want to represent as part of our learning journey and showcasing those achievements as we're working our way through our individual learning path pathways. We do this through the use of open badges. So open badges is an open standard. This means it's not locked to our ecosystem.
We can earn and achieve these badges in a variety of sources, and it allows us to capture some of the important parts of evidence of our learning. We can capture information such as the issuer details, who's offering, who's credentialing these items, the learner themselves, what they did to earn those specific achievements, as well as those alignments and evidence all bundled together within one package. So as Farrah covered, it's more than just an image. This is a series of metadata breaking down that learner's achievement in a shareable format that's gonna follow them for the lifetime of their learning. Really powerful.
So now we're gonna come into the product itself and take a look at how we can deliver these micro credentials, offer them, and send them through to our users. So from the teaching perspective, within your Canvas courses themselves, Parchment digital badges will appear as a sidebar item. So here under Parchment badges, and this is gonna allow us to both deliver and create badges as well as manage those badges within our environment for our users. So at a high level, we can track the group progress of our class and cohorts and see who's earning what within our ecosystem, which badges are being earned over time, and the individual learners' progress as they're earning more and more requirements within our specific course. These badges themselves can be tied to the completion of either the entire course or subparts of that component, so finishing particular modules or assessments to different and varying levels of degree.
Once we've set those up, we can also start to gamify these elements, creating leaderboards, attaching points to these badges, and encouraging our users to potentially take up extracurricular nonformal assessment parts of a course to earn those badges and earn those top slots in your class. Here, we've set up some pseudonyms. So users actually won't see their names. They'll see each other's, pseudonyms through here, and they can compete for those top slots in the leaderboards based off the points they're earning throughout their cohorts and their classes. Setting up the badges is incredibly easy.
We can simply configure badges directly through the front end interface, either creating brand new badges or allocating existing badges to components of our course completion. So we can target either the overall course grades. So let's say I want to give a gold trophy, bronze trophy to users who finish the course overall either to a certain standard, so a percentage above eighty percent, or simply by completing the course and automatically grant them those badges themselves. We could also tie to module completion. So if we have particular elements of our class, week one, week two, module one, module two, we can target those as part of those deliveries and offer badges according to the completion of those items as well.
So while we have our formal standardized assessments around our course grades, we can also target the collective programmatic content and then attribute those to our students as well. The last way we can attribute is based off our assessments. So automatically based off how our students are are scoring in particular quizzes, particular assessment or elements within our course designs, we can offer again those badges, trophies targeting the specific completion of those items or automatically to a degree of success. So for example, when a student receives a satisfactory within this quiz, we're automatically gonna be granting them those badges. So this allows us a central control of our course, of our credentialing, puts the power in the hands of the teachers, and lets them control exactly how they want their course to play out.
And then as they're running the course, students are automatically collecting these badges. They're gonna centralize all within their backpacks, and they're going to be able to automatically earn these without that extra intervention needed by the teaching staff there as well. So really quite powerful. Once we've earned a badge as a student, this is where we start to be able to showcase, collect, and send these externally. We have an internal system known as a backpack.
This is gonna collect within Canvas through a backpack side tab. It's gonna allow us to show what we've earned, when we've earned them, and which organization organization granted us those components. If I open up our workplace numeracy badge here, we could view a series of different pieces of metadata attached directly to this badge. So we have our offering institution by our demo environment. This would be your institution and your institution's reputation, which is offering and credentialing this item.
We have an issue date as well as a description. So what did we do to earn this badge? What did we achieve, and what was the process to get to this point in time? We can also attach additional, criterias and tagging here if we choose to as well. So we can bake a whole series of metadata, including skill alignments to these badges as well. Opening these skill alignments is actually gonna take us to Indeed and showcase us some of the jobs that might require that skill for helping our learners out even further. But once we have one of these badges, we wanna be able to share this.
We wanna be to send this to others within an institution. So this is where we can enable this from public to from private to public, and then we can start to share this link externally. So either as a share URL, which is going to create a public share link where I can send this the information out to an external party, or I can attach this to a series of different socials. If I want to attach to LinkedIn, to Facebook, to x, I can send these as tiles into those locations and start to feed your users back into the flow, back to your organization as they're sending these out to jobs and industry. Once we've created these share links, they exist beyond your Canvas institution.
These follow your user around for their lifetime as they're moving through different life states from early learning to adult education through to their life in in, day to day jobs. They're gonna be collecting these badges, taking them with them, and using them multiple times throughout their careers and their lives. So these public share links that we have are gonna be attached to their personal accounts, and they can share them whenever they need and wherever they need. But, again, these are gonna feed users back to your organization. They're gonna feed them back to the learning that was attributed.
And if you're using Canvas catalog, you can actually feed them directly back to your listings themselves. So if you are having a store fronting option attached to Canvas, you wanna feed your users back through the badges to purchase your courses, they can centralize that all within one place here as well. Incredibly powerful. But coming back to our badge flow, we can start to set up and configure things at an administrator level as well. So beyond the ability to offer singular centralized badges, we can also attach these badges to pathways.
We can start to showcase our users' journey as they're earning multiple badges, stacking those requirements as they earn from micro achievements to those macro outcomes that they're trying to work towards. And we can visualize this process for them as well as allow our teaching staff to track those individual students and where they're at in their individual pathways. So this opens the doors for a whole series of different types of badging solutions. We can offer macro achievements when they're finishing qualifications all the way to those minor achievements of fantastic with going a leg up, going an extra mile within a classroom, and give them that acknowledgment directly. So these collective badges are work work They collect together based off prerequisites so we can tie the sequence of completion that a user needs to complete.
And because we're tying these towards our open badging standard, it also means that we can bring in badges from external sources. So our institution may not offer the language literacy numeracy check, working with children's check, or police check. But if these organizations are offering open badge standards, we can connect them to our pathways, and we can showcase how prerequisites from other organizations are feeding into our organization and then feeding onwards into industry, really tying that package together in a neat bar. Really fantastic way to do this. So we're looking at our early career childhood careers badge here, but we can tie together a series of different requirements around our deliveries, whether this is higher education, early learning, RTO environments, and really start to show our users and motivate our users to continue and finish what they've started throughout their learning journey.
Last thing I wanna cover is a little bit from our administrator side. So in our back end system supporting your admin teams, we can do a series of different things. Beyond the ability for us to be able to automatically offer badges, we can group and bulk award badges to either existing students who have previously completed requirements so we can retrospectively issue badges. We can also revoke badges if necessary, set end limits. So let's say, is only valid for twelve months.
And then we can start to do some more fancy things within the badge itself, like offering certificates branded by our organization and really start to customize and white label this approach to really represent your brand and your image within the badge approach itself. Badges are incredibly easy to set up and create as we can simply upload badge images, our our general information around what was earned, what was the achievement type, and the criterias, and then they're gonna feed automatically within your Canvas infrastructure where you can start to say these badges align with these deliveries and then automate that process end to end. That's a basic overview of our badging approach. Do we have any questions in the q and a that we wanted to jump in before we redirect back to the group? We do have a few. I think you've actually answered a number of them, but, I mean, you're the expert, and I would love to hear your explanation on some of these things.
So I will revisit a few questions. I think you did answer these. The first question we had was from Anna Marie, and it was how the system works for RTOs in terms of recognizing partial completion. So I think just a moment ago, you were showing how to stack towards, certain skill sets or a group of units within a qualification. Can you issue something like a digital badge alongside a statement of attainment? Absolutely.
So we can granularly break these down to whatever degree you need. Because we can attach to individual courses, modules, or individual assessments, we have a lot of flexibility in terms of how we wanna offer these badges, and we can even separate this approach from Canvas entirely if you need. If you want to attribute users to specific badges separate to the LMS, you can grant them those badges manually as an administrator as well. So if you did want to give extra achievements, those gold trophies for your students who are potentially top performers, wanna separate that from the LMS and give them those individual attributes that they can carry with them over their different life journey, then you can do that manually as well. So a lot of flexibility in terms of how we wanna utilize the system to both grant those achievements and use our reputation as an organization to offer that to our students as well.
Awesome. Thanks, Justin. The next question we had again, I think you touched on this a bit, but if you wouldn't mind elaborating. In terms of badges and credentials and the the assigning of skills or those unique identifiers, is there a way for those unique identifiers and employers to validate some of that, or how does that work when skills are assigned? So they're assigned at a high level as the badges are created. So my recommendation there would to be to have your learning design teams create those badges aligned to those skills ahead of time, and then they're attributed to evidence of those throughout the Canvas course creations.
So whether that's an assessment, a module, or individual components of the course that's showcasing that delivery, we're then aligning it to the skills similar as we would to an outcomes or a curriculum layer, as we're aligning those individual, delivery items to the badge and then the evidence attached to there as well. Awesome. Thank you. And the next question, you were touching just before on how to incorporate other badges as well. Do they have to be part of open badges, or are there other kinds of certificates or institutions where you can import badges from? They do need to be open badges.
So if they are open badges from external organizations, you can actually create sub issuers within your own organization if you want to white label that approach. So that's one option is to have essentially a division of your infrastructure dedicated to offering those on the behalf of others. Or if they've already granted an open badge, they can simply import that into their Canvas part their Parchment digital badges, backpack and then showcase that over time. So, unfortunately, it doesn't need to be open badge standards as that's an open community standard allowing everything to plug and play nicely together. Cool.
Thank you. And the last one and, again, I think you touched on this when we were talking about pathways and stacking. The question was, can you set it up that participants in a course receive a certificate of completion for a minimum amount of activities, but that they can then receive additional badges for bonus activities or bonus modules? Absolutely. We took a look at that through pathways. So we might have a critical pathway here for completion towards our early childhood careers, but we might have a completely separate pathway, which is those elective components.
Did you engage with the community? Did you engage with student groups that may not be that graded formal assessment, but we still want to give those students those achievements so we can stack multiple different pathways within a singular course. We actually saw that in this course here where we can have multiple pathways connected, and those pathways might align to wider qualification sets, or they could be as just a nice to have to track use your students' progress and to track those micro achievements that might be separate to their formal grades, but we still wanna acknowledge those achievements for our students. Perfect. Amazing. See, I knew you would answer those far better than I could.
Thank you for doing that. Appreciate it. We are gonna flick back now. Thank you, Justin, for the amazing demo. I hope that gives you a little more insight into the actual functionality and even just some of those little use cases that we know happen in higher ed in our RTO spaces and how there's flexibility and how you might wanna issue your badges.
Now what we're gonna do is move on to some more interesting information. So we know at the moment, the data in the world does not really replace a lived experience. So it's been well and good for Justin and I to talk to you about all of these great things. But the experience that an institution has firsthand and how they've successfully implemented a badge program is something that we're really keen to share today. And this is why we've invited the team from University of Sunshine Coast to share how they embedded these tools into their design and innovation curriculum at USC.
I'm so grateful that Keith and Toby could be here today because I think their insights will really show you how to move from that strategic planning plea piece into the living, breathing ecosystem of recognition that we know will truly serve your campus community and your learners. So please welcome Keith Murphin and doctor Toby Gifford. They are kindly on the call with us. And so I think just really broadly, tell us what you did. Tell us about your journey using Parchment and Digital Badges at USC.
Thanks, Farrah. Yeah. So I think I'll let Toby explain just a little bit more about the course that we were we were running and where this journey started for us. And then I think maybe once we've kind of got a context on it, we can just talk a bit little bit about the practical practical elements. You know, when we went and started this journey, we weren't offering micro credentials.
We were just in an exploration phase. We didn't have any sorts of badging, and we can maybe just talk a little bit about some of the the things we had to think about in those challenges. So I might just hand over to Toby first of all just to maybe introduce what we were doing and what the course was, and then we can talk about some of the the things that came out of it. Thanks, Keith, and thanks, Farrah. So I'm Toby Gifford from the University of the Sunshine Coast, lecturer in design.
And so a couple of years ago, the Commonwealth government started a sort of a pilot scheme in micro credentials. So they were interested in exploring micro credentials as a alternative to the kind of full degrees and diplomas that we've got, you know, for all the reasons that we've been talking about today. They there's also some appetite in the government for seeing this as a new approach to training and skills. And so they approved twenty micro credentials around Australia, I believe, and we applied to set up a micro credential in digital accessibility. So digital accessibility is about making sure that digital interfaces like websites and documents and communications are accessible to people with disability so you can imagine if you are blind then a lot of websites and so on are challenging to use.
And, of course, there's lots of tools that one can make can use to make these websites more accessible for people with a range of conditions, such as not being able to see or not being able to use a keyboard and so on. And so this is a kind of an important thing for us to do as a country, as a society, and there was a lack of training in this available, and so we identified this as a really good place to you know, a good opportunity for a micro credential. And I guess of particular interest was we really wanted to target people who were in full time work, essentially, people who were in positions where they were kind of at the coalface either as, you know, marketing managers for companies or in government or web designers in in such positions. And, you know, people who are not gonna stop and do another full time degree because they're already in work, and they just really did need some skills up training. So it seemed like a a perfect opportunity for this goal.
And we partnered with the Centre for Accessibility Australia, who are the kind of peak body in digital accessibility, and put in put in a proposal for this micro credential, which was approved. And so that's fantastic, and we've been rolling that out for a few deliveries now. And, of course, we wanted to, you know, have some kind of qualification attached to this. And because this is a pilot project of the government, it's not really it's all new, basically. So there's a established TEQSA framework for degrees and certificates and diplomas and so on, whereas there isn't really for micro credentials, or at least if there is, it's kind of influx and new.
And so, you know, the question is how do we how do how do people advertise the fact that they've completed this? How do we how do we recognize people's completion of this skilled upskilling in a in a way that's useful to them? And so we thought that the digital badges was a great way to do this. And so, I mean, interestingly, part of the the way the course was developed, as I said, was in conjunction with a peak body for digital accessibility, and they had already received some grant funding to do some development, and that was kind of leveraged in this. And part of that grant funding, know, part of the conditions of that was that some aspect of this was open to the public. So whilst we were developing a course, which is a course that students take at our university, we also made a portion of that course available free. And it's up there in quite a lot of people.
So we've had about a thousand people look at this free course now and about sixty going through the full micro credential. And so there was a bit of a question for us at first. We thought these Parchment digital badges or or Canvas badges as they were called at the time would be a great way to attach a qualification to this. And there was a a bit of a, I guess, decision to be made as to whether we would make this available to people who undertook this free course or whether to keep it restricted to the kind of micro credential. And we ended up deciding to keep it restricted to the micro credential, I mean, partially because the free course is totally open and we don't really have control and we don't want to control how many people take it, the more the merrier, really.
And, you know, there is a cost, not not massive, but there is some cost associated, or there's a limited number of licenses that we have for these badges, and so we couldn't really attach them to those without, you know, thinking about the scaling of it. But, secondly, we really did want this badge to hold value and the sense that, you know, this was a serious achievement. And so we decided in the end to restrict the issuance of this badge that you can see on the screen to people who've gone through this, what actually is quite an intensive micro credential. So that's kind of the context of the of the badging. And as I said, we've had a number of learners be issued with this badge so far.
And I've have found probably that certainly, students were very interested in the badge. Like, it it held it did seem to hold genuine value for them. And I think probably the most common place where students would like wanted to display their badge was on LinkedIn. I wonder, Farrah, if you could or whoever's running the slides could skip to the next slide there. Thank you.
So this is a example student that has put their badge on their LinkedIn site, And, you know, look, it's great. So it's great for them, but it's also great for us because now, you know, we're visible. The the university is visible on their LinkedIn profile in a way that, you know, is not really the case with, like, a degree on a piece of paper. Like, spinning on their wall, and they walk in the office. But yep.
And, Toby, I went and had a look at the stats as well afterwards, and I think there were sixty seven profiles that this has been attached to and a few extra shares in LinkedIn. And as you call out, it's it's ninety ninety odd percent LinkedIn and only a couple on Facebook or or other sources. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
So yeah. Look. I think in in that perspective, it's it's all been a very positive experience and one that's worked well for the use case we've had. Now that's not to say that it hasn't been without some wrinkles. I was I was gonna ask about that.
The intent sounds amazing. It sounds like the uptake's been great, but I guess, you know, bureaucracy is a is a huge thing in universities. And so I'm keen, and I know that people attending were keen to understand. What were some of the challenges you ran into or the things that you didn't foresee that you suddenly went, oh, we've gotta think about this? Well, there were lots there were quite a lot of technical ones to start, I think. You know, we we this was new for us.
We didn't have a place to offer offer badging or, you know, even a platform to to offer these micro credentials on on it first. So there was a lot of that sort of figuring things out, like, are we actually gonna deliver it? How do we get these users into Canvas? How do we how do we structure even, you know, those pages? And, you know, you can see, like, how do we structure the design of the issuers? So who gets an issuer? What's a formal issuer? You know, there was lots of conversations with our marketing team to make sure that that design of the badge would work for this one. And then also, you know, what happens if we offer many of these? You know, would we need to have a version that indicated this one maybe belong to the school of business, or do we need ones for health? And so there was a lot of discussion about the hierarchy of badging and that recognition. So I would say working with your marketing team is is quite important because I think that is what this is, is a lot of marketing. And then as as Toby mentioned, you know, the value of these issue is, you know, it's gotta mean something.
You don't wanna give you know, hand them out for everything. But then other conversations, you know, obviously, we use my equals, and I I know there's now that merger that's happened. So so maybe in a future state, this will will be one with our use of MyEquals. But, you know, there was discussion, do we upload these into MyEquals? And even in that getting our users in, you know, a lot of these users are in a I wanna come in. I wanna buy I wanna enroll and pay for something in in in this space.
I think these are fully fledged students because of the government grant. So so they went through a standard enrollment process. But if you were offering them for the free courses and for for others, there are all these challenges in that model that we had to discuss. So so, yeah, it was kinda it was kinda interesting. And I think, Toby, you and I, we were just reflecting on it in prep for this that, you know, even deciding on some of those skills.
I can remember a conversation where we sat there and looking at so what skills are we is this is this representing? And or even how long is it valid? I think it was interesting to see the five year statistic that you called out of the half life because we were sat there going, well, how long is this valid for? And I think we went for the five years. It's actually how long these badges are valid. But these are all questions where there wasn't a lot of information or precedence for us to to make these decisions on. I have a may not controversial, but now that you have hindsight in your favor and you've had some great outcomes and good uptake, if if you could do this again, what what do you wish you knew? I'm not sure. I feel like we haven't done this again very quickly since.
I think I think the whole micro credentials and the use of catalog for us is still quite challenging. I think we found that, you know, our our standard process and our standard systems do not lend themselves to MicroCreds and these badges neatly. So it just felt like every time you had a question, you you didn't get an answer, you got three more questions. And so our biggest challenge really on on rolling this out mass is how do we adjust and how do we streamline all of that process. So I do think from this individual one, this was very successful.
It was a really good choice, I think. It was it was very apt, and I think we should progress with a few more in in this vein. But the management and and and then yeah. All the process that goes with this was was quite challenging. So I wish we'd had things a little bit more advanced in our process to be able to handle handle some of these.
Yeah. From my perspective, I guess just the reality of having a short course but which we had actual students for, which meant that they got issued, you know, Uni SC emails, which they needed to do to get into Canvas through this particular portal. But the fact that they weren't attached to a wider program so that quite quickly after the micro credential finished, which was, you know, very short, those that access was not available to them and, you know, they hadn't all collected their badges, and they didn't really have a backpack. And there was a bit of manual quite a bit of manual follow-up on my behalf just trying to figure out how to how to get them their badge, basically, just because we hadn't you know, we we didn't really have the system set up for it. And, yeah, I guess just on on tiny things, just, you know, a bit of knowledge ahead of time about the design of things.
So, again, I don't think I still don't quite sure I know the answer to this. But if you if you were able flip to that slide again, Farrah The LinkedIn one? The LinkedIn one. The I'd I'm not actually sure whether this is to do with the way the student has set this up or whether this is how LinkedIn works, but our design gets cut off in that LinkedIn view. And so maybe we needed to use a a smaller image, or maybe I just need to tell students how to embed it better. I'm not sure.
But, you know, these are the little things that, you know, until you actually go to do one of these, you you sort of you don't encounter until it yeah. Yeah. Definitely. There's also been a question in the chat if if able to share a bit more on the planning side of things and your strategy that that you use to approach. Obviously, this was initiated from the government funding that is that the Australian government rolled out.
How did you engage with your cocreators? What how did you yep. The planning part of things. For the course too? Oh, and and and to the badge. Well, for the course itself, just the nature of the material is, you know, nothing nothing about us without us is the catch cry for most disability advocacy networks. So the the whole course was codesigned quite strongly with the industry peak body.
So they have a lot of people with lived experience of disability who were there from the beginning in course design and, you know, auditing the course and so on. From their perspective on the badging, I I don't think they really had a perspective on that. And in terms of our planning of this, I I'm not Keith might be a better place to answer that. I I just think it was there, and we thought it would be good. And I know we talked a little bit even about the choice of skills, and you'd sort of alluded to this before too.
Yeah. To be perfectly honest, I think that we didn't plan. We came to the point where we went to try and put these badges together and realized that that was part of it, and so we did it. And I I guess that was, I guess, another point of potential friction is that I mean, yes, the micro credential program that the government will come and put forward has a concept of skills, but the badging system has a concept of skills, and they're not the same taxonomy. I mean, they're related, but they're one of them's from the company, Indeed, and one of them's from the Australian government.
So, you know, it wasn't that hard to kind of match them eventually, but, you know, again, that wasn't necessarily planned. That was just discovered along the way. That's fair. Keith, did you have anything you wanted to add in that in terms of the planning side? No. I was just saying we were actually running quite a big micro credentials project that spanned quite a few years to kind of explore all of these challenges.
And this one just kind of the timing of this was really, really good to to actually execute one, and this was the first one we executed. So there was a whole structured, you know, investigation. You know, we were obviously liaising with a lot of other universities, and our central learning and teaching team were kind of doing a lot of that understanding on how, you know, the curriculum might be structured, how this fits in our curriculum management system, and how those flows will work. But it was a a long project that proved that it could be done, but it did leave a legacy of a lot of manual process for that enrollment and for those integrations that we're we're still cleaning up now. And we have a few other micro credentials that are sort of on the on the path that hopefully, we will then improve the process a little bit more as we go for the next round.
Nice. That answered I was gonna ask what you're thinking next, so that's really helpful to hear. Appreciate that. Well, we appreciate the panel, and thank you, Toby and Keith, for sharing your thoughts. And more importantly, what what how it actually went for you in terms of the implementation.
I think that's really key to hear the journey and and really what goes into that work. If there are any other questions, please feel free to pop them in the chat or in our q and a function. We can get those answered. But we are tracking a bit ahead of schedule, so we might be able to wrap up a bit sooner rather than later. I think and I'm gonna put Toby and Keith on the spot a little bit.
But if you had to, I guess, maybe summarize a a nudge or just something to say to people who are considering implementing badging a lot in within their institution, what would be, you know, your one bit of advice or your one little barbecue chat to go? This is what I need you to to know before you go down this path. Look, I think understanding what it is you're getting is the interesting piece. You know, I think I think a a lot of you know, we had a lot of academics approach us with ideas of saying, oh, we wanna do this thing. It's a micro credential. And, you know, this is the reason we wanna do it.
But I think just be clear and understand, you know, is this a marketing exercise? Is this a skills gap challenge? And the costing model that you'd need to use for this is really challenging in your broader model. So I would just say, you know, understand why or or when you're working through this process is understand really what the driver is for you and then what all of those costs involve because it it it was a lot of work for for what it eventuated, and I think we we learned a lot from it. But if we were relying it just as an income stream, it would be quite a a different conversation, I think. That is excellent advice. Appreciate that.
Toby, how about you? Look. I I mean, to sort of put a positive spin on things, I think my advice is go for it. They're great. Nice. I wasn't quite as involved in the painful discoveries, I suppose, or just the, you know, the tricky tricky technical aspects of it.
So, you know, definitely listen to Keith there. But at the end of the day, I think it's been very valuable and it has worked out well for us. Yeah. And it sounds like the starting small approach was really effective because, you know, to both of your points, you were able to iron out a lot of things. It surfaced a lot of things that you didn't realize were gonna come up, but starting small sounded like a really good way forward.
Amazing. Well, I think we're finished the session a little bit earlier than planned, which is great. We love being able to do that. There are a couple more questions in the q and a. Jackie, we can probably pick that up with you afterwards in terms of how to get Canvas and Badges speaking to each other.
That was something that Justin touched on, and it will be back in the recording when we share that as well. And, Nicola, there was a question about cost considerations. I'm not sure if you're asking specifically about pricing or if this was a question, you know, more broadly about the the the work that goes into the implementation from an institution, but we can certainly pick that up with you separately as well. Otherwise, thank you for choosing to spend your time with us this afternoon or this morning, wherever you are dialing in from. Always a great opportunity to get together as colleagues in this space and really hear about the great things that are happening and really what's driving us as we move forward in a really interesting time in the education landscape.
Thank you again. We will be sharing a recording, shortly afterwards in a follow-up email. So thank you for your time, and it was lovely to see you all. Thanks, everyone.
