Using digital badges in faculty development: Motivating or meaningless?

One of the best ways to encourage reluctant faculty to use new technologies is to allow them the opportunity to experience them as a student. This lightening talk focuses on the use of digital badges in a faculty development teaching course, including the faculty’s reactions to them, at AUS.

This lightening talk will focus on the use of badges with AUS faculty enrolled in the faculty teaching certificate program (FTCP) at American University of Sharjah (AUS). The FTCP is a one-year blended learning program designed to give AUS faculty members the opportunity to explore best practices in their own, and in other, disciplines. A number of online pedagogical tools are utilized in class to allow faculty to gain experience with the tools as a student. As Hickey, Willis & Quick (2015) note, there are four major functions of digital badges in higher education specifically, recognizing learning, assessing learning, studying learning and motivating learning. The badges have been used in the FTCP mainly as a motivating tool to encourage faculty to participate in the online discussion and “to influence engagement and learning through the provision of focused goals, tasks, and affirmation of performance” (Abramovich, Schunn, & Mitsuo, 2013). The presenter will discuss the faculty’s reaction to the use of digital badges as well as the lessons learned and changes made to the implementation of the badges in the course over the two years she has been implementing them.