Digital badges at Dallas College are intended to fill in the gaps between courses and degrees, helping students tell the story of what they know and can do because of their time at Dallas College. Importantly, they are intentionally bound to academic outcomes, operationalized through marketable skills.
Students develop important skills in general education at colleges and universities across the nation, but many have a great deal of difficulty translating their academic work product into the language of the workplace. Meanwhile, employers can’t easily infer individualized skills demonstration on a transcript. Furthermore, students are socialized to approach their community college experience as one of doing their basics or checking boxes before moving on in transfer and speak about their experience in those terms, rather than in a skills-forward narrative. Lastly and crucially, community college students have complex lives, and completion and transfer rates remain low. For all these reasons, it is imperative for institutions to equip students with tools to tell their stories. Marketable skills and digital badges do just that.
When asked, faculty generally agree that they help students become career ready in their classes but, in doing so, lack a coherent strategy or a shared language across disciplines, departments and schools. Our solution is to intentionally integrate marketable skills in the core curriculum (general education) courses through our Marketable Skills Initiative. In Texas, core faculty are required to assess six (6) core objectives (communication, critical thinking, teamwork, personal responsibility, social responsibility, empirical and quantitative skills), but core objective assessment is institution facing; marketable skills are student-facing.
An early decision in creating the Marketable Skills Initiative was to house our skills inventory within the Core Objectives, to not task faculty with implementing a new framework but to make the skills explicit within the existing, required one. We gathered a team of faculty to review skills and career inventories at universities across the country, consulted the NACE competencies and ultimately created our Marketable Skills Inventory. We further refined the inventory to match the language of the Lightcast Skills Taxonomy, incorporating those terms into our digital badges.
The Marketable Skills Initiative is implemented through our Faculty Integrator Program, which is application- and cohort-based. Faculty integrators are required to do the following:
- Provide introductory modules (creating awareness of marketable skills and how to leverage them in career services) in all courses via our LMS. These introductory modules inform students about the connection between their academic work and the language of the workplace and advise students to visit career and transfer services, beginning in their first semester. Students are also informed of the Career Explorer digital badging pathway (see below), which signals their career readiness through completion of milestone activities.
- Utilize the Marketable Skills Inventory, which provides an operationalization of the core objectives in skills terms, utilizing the Lightcast Skills Taxonomy, in discussion of course requirements; similarly, explicitly listing the skills to be practiced in each syllabus.
- Align at least one major assignment with marketable skills.
- Require a structured reflection, giving students the opportunity to engage in metacognition while considering their skills development.
This approach acknowledges the fantastic work done by our faculty, while helping them put old wine in new bottles, equipping our students with skills-based language. The program is a light lift for faculty, utilizing the core objectives the state requires faculty to assess but creating a skills inventory to give life to those objectives.
The Marketable Skills Initiative at Dallas College preceded our digital badging program and informed much of phase I of our badges. It’s crucial to center education in edtech for any digital credential solutions, and digital badges must be tied to well-defined learning outcomes and evidence of learning. It was a logical step to begin our digital badging program with skills developed in courses, moving from skills articulation to digital badges that provide markers of that skills acquisition. Digital badging at Dallas College is a phased program that has developed student badging solutions for the following:
- Marketable skills developed in classes—Students can apply for 35 individual skills badges and be enrolled in six (6) competency badges. Students attest to the demonstration of the selected skill by offering successful completion of two assignments in two different courses and provide a structured reflection for each. Once a student receives a badge, they are automatically enrolled in the competency pathway.
- A Career Explorer pathway that highlights completion of career readiness milestones. Students in every integrated section are made aware of this pathway and are encouraged to interact with career and transfer services from their first semester. Elements of this pathway have also been incorporated into the first-year success course.
- Participation in select co- and extracurricular programs—programs with very well-defined earning criteria, including student life programming, honor society chapter participation, our honors program and service learning.
- Digital literacy skills developed in English courses and with interactions with our learning commons (libraries).
As digital badges are relatively new to Dallas College, a comprehensive communications strategy was and is vital. We focused our messaging based on audience:
- For students: An LMS-based student training organization (over 98,000 students are auto-enrolled in the training), an external webpage, student services and learning commons “Lunch and Learn” series, kiosks and video screens, and targeted messaging (email and LMS). Student communications make the why explicit (which marketable skill is being practiced, what proficiency looks like and how to share the badge on resumes/LinkedIn), and the emphasis on the digital badge acts as an outward representation of skills acquisition, creating an authentic personal brand.
- For faculty and staff: All-college event presentations, on-demand webinars, targeted emails and LMS-based community of practice and SharePoint (intranet) resource page, adjunct professional development events and inclusion in new faculty and new student services staff onboarding.
Our past and current work has brought understanding and utility to our student population and faculty and staff at Dallas College. We are in the proposal period for new badge programs and expect to see a variety of proposals that help students, faculty and staff articulate their skills. Employers are the next audience for our communications strategy. We are working with offices within the college who have direct relationships with employers to create understanding and awareness of digital badging. We are eager to partner with employers to create a broad, cross-industry marketable skills advisory group, asking for input on authentic and competency-based assignments that we can adapt in courses to further student skill development.
We are early in our implementation of digital badges. Our program will be iterative and reflective, finding out what works, what doesn’t and meeting student and workforce needs as they develop. There is no one-size-fits-all digital badging or microcredentialing solution. We recommend contextualized solutions that match student, faculty, community and employer needs and keep higher education’s foundational goals front of mind.
Find out more about Dallas College Digital Badging: DallasCollege.edu/Badges
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