Microsoft Partners in Learning Badge System

Microsoft is working to teach technology skills so that individuals and society might benefit from this knowledge. We share the

ultimate goal of all stakeholders—use technology to help improve education and the learning experience, create opportunity,

and raise living standards for people around the world.

The potential of education to be an equalizer of social disparity is significant and is further enhanced by the current state of the

world – economic imperatives and demographic realities make change more necessary, and technology makes change more

accessible and scalable. Given an overall market size of approximately 4M institutions, 77M educators, and 1.4B students, the

international ICT (Information Communication Technology) standards which prepare K-12 students for greater success in their

professional careers has resulted in an increased global focus on education, a top prioritization by Microsoft, and growing

competitive pressure in the education market.

Microsoft’s Partners in Learning was created in order to make this potential a reality. Partners in Learning (PIL) is a global

initiative with the objective of improving learning experiences by supporting educators and school leaders in acquiring the skills

needed to incorporate ICT teaching and learning practices which enable students to build 21st

century skills.

The Partners in Learning Network (PiLN) serves as the focal point for Partners in Learning; it is the public face of the program

and is the engine used to engage and recruit educators and school leaders. The newly revamped network will drive value for

educators and school leaders by focusing on three fundamental themes:

Discovery: Enable educators to find resources that can be immediately used in the classroom, such as: access to free

software, tools, lesson plans, and other user-generated content.

Collaboration: Provide an opportunity to connect and collaborate with other educators, school leaders, and their

classrooms by building global communities of innovating teaching practices.

Life-long Learning: Support educators and school leaders in acquiring the skills needed to use ICT teaching and

learning practices through a meaningful set of professional development content and curriculum.

The environment and context for education is changing at a rapid pace through the commoditization of content, new learning

paths to becoming an educator, the influence of social networking, and the pervasiveness of mobile devices and applications.

The abundance of knowledge, resources, and accessibility to information available today requires a different approach from the

generic one-size fits all engagement models of the past. New tools, like the use of badge systems as a means to reward,

recognize, and motivate behavior, will fast become an essential change agent in capturing one’s skills, competencies, and

achievements.

How Badges Work The Partners in Learning Network will support educators and school leader’s active participation in the Partners in Learning

Program by instituting a rewards and recognitions system through the use of badges. Badges will be achieved by completing a

self-defined professional development path, community contributions (posting content, contributing to discussions, providing

translation improvement), and obtaining certain designations which represent various skill sets within the program.

The framework for earning badges within the Partners in Learning Network is as follows:

Points: teachers earn points for different activities. Activities may include training, participating in IEF, certification,

facilitating a discussion group or contributing content

Badges: educators and school leaders earn badges by accumulating points

Designations: designations can be earned by accumulating required points, badges or set manually based on defined

criteria

Badges for Professional Development and Training The PiL Program will support educators and school leader’s efforts to effectively integrate technology into classrooms by

awarding merit badges for the completion of training courses. These badges can be obtained as users demonstrate specific

skills and knowledge as part of their learning path. The training modules will range from: short-transaction based “learning

snacks” focusing on how to use Microsoft technology and open standards such as HTML, to a more formalized course of

professional development content aligned to UNESCO’s Competency Framework for Teachers (CFT). Users will acquire points

for completing each module. Once a user has accumulated enough points he/she will be awarded a badge for that course.

The two courses we will award badges for are listed below: Microsoft Fundamentals- which covers Microsoft technologies

applied within an education setting and Teaching with Technology –which covers the integration of technology into teaching

and learning context using standards-aligned to the UNESCO ICT-CFT, Technology Literacy Strand. Successful study of

curriculum is a readiness indicator for obtaining a Microsoft Certified Educator badge found in the Designation Badges.

Digital Storytelling using Live

Movie Maker

Collaboration with OneNote

Digital Storytelling using

AutoCollage and Photostory

Exploring the world with Bing

Maps and Photosynth

Creating Music with

Songsmith

SkyDrive and Office WebApps

Productive learning with

Office/Windows

Why Does the ICT-CFT

Promote Technology

Literacy?

Selecting ICT Resources to

Support Curriculum

Outcomes

How do Technology and

Pedagogy Mix?

Use Basic ICT Tools to Support

Teaching and Learning

Organize and Manage the Use

of ICT in Your Classroom

Technology Literacy and Your

Professional Development

Microsoft Fundamentals

1

Teaching with Technology

2

Designation Badges Within the PiL Program we will segment our community into different tiers; these tiers will be represented by designation

badges earned through the user’s participation and completion of trainings. We will optimize around the philosophy that

everyone is a "winner" just by registering and will be awarded a Microsoft PiL badge. We want to empower an army of

educators and some may be evangelists that simply cannot meet the criteria because they cannot participate in training for

language reasons; at the same time, those that can and do, are recognized with higher level statuses; i.e. Microsoft Innovative

Educator or Trainer, making it easy for us and others to recognize them and their work in the system.

The following is a representation of the designation badges our users can earn and the criteria associated with how they’re

awarded:

Activity Badges The Activity Badges are used to quantify fundamental program activity and interactions within the Partners in Learning

Network. These are points that educators earn by being a good community member. What constitutes a good community

member can be many things such as; adding content, rating content, leading and responding to discussions and recommending

content. All these things improve the overall quality of the experience. The Activity Badges will also recognizes achievements

around the Partners in Learning Regional and Global Forum competitions which help promote the personal identity of an

individual’s standing within the community. The main goal for Activity Badges is to encourage continual engagement and drive

activity within the Partners in Learning Network.

A few examples of Activity Badges include:

Partner in Learning Innovative Educator Certified Educator Trainer

Register and

Complete Profile

Completion of

Fundamentals and

Teaching w/ Tech

Pass Microsoft

Certified Educator

Exam

Attend F2F

Microsoft Institute

Training

Partner in Learning Forum Badges

Participant, Local, Regional, and Global Winners

Discussion Moderator Community Collaborator PiL Research Participant

Badge Display Within the PiLN, the profile page captures all of the user’s activities within the system as well as how many badges they’ve

acquired. Anywhere within the Network a member can click on another members name and view their profile. The visitor to

the profile can immediately gain a sense of the member’s contributions, participation level, and status on the Network. By

prominently displaying the user’s achievements and badges, the system helps promote the identity of individuals within the

larger community. Obtaining badges will become the currency by which educators and school leader’s measure and

simultaneously create their own personal brand and begin to build a reputation among their peers.

As you can see from the image below, a person’s designation will be highlighted in a marquee within their profile page while

their badges are prominently displayed for everyone in the community to see.

Badge Storage As part of this effort the Microsoft Partners in Learning Team plans to create a framework to record achievements and surface

badges on demand. This framework could be an implementation of the Mozilla Open Badges Platform built on the Microsoft

cloud-based Windows Azure platform. Such an approach aligns our learning platform with a broader system of standards and

creates an opportunity to expand the scope of achievements beyond the Partners in Learning Network. An implementation of

the OBP can be used by other groups within Microsoft to support other badge systems and might also be made available to the

public as a portal for the storage and authentication of badges created by third-party partners.

How Applicants Can Participate While the Partners in Learning Team has a loosely defined framework for how badges will work within the Partners in Learning

Network, there are still a number of outstanding issues which applicants can help lend their expertise to help solve. Specific

areas of need are:

Help determine the semantics around creating a workflow of points vs. badges. If we have the idea of awarding

badges for certain designations (Innovative Educator, Certified Educator, etc.) what is the best way to incent behavior

to achieve these designations. Do we reward badges for all activities, or should points accrue to the designations.

How easy do we make obtaining badges/points? What philosophy should we follow in determining how easy it is for

users to gain achievements?

What are the total list of achievements we should account for?

How do we showcase mechanisms that demonstrate how close users are to obtaining achievements? Are user’s one

thing away or 100 things away? From a design perspective what does the UI look like to demonstrate how close a user

is?

What cool, thought provoking, or entertaining names should we call our badges?

What imagery should we use, should it be fanciful or more descriptive?

There is a broad range of possible partnership opportunities; the PiL Team is open to new ideas for badges but also for partners

who can help to build parts of the infrastructure such as widgets, pipelines, tracking mechanisms, etc.

Summary By participating in the digital media and learning competition Microsoft is joining a larger movement to create a unified and

open platform for the creation, storage, authentication and display of badges. Such an ecosystem has many benefits. The

friction of creating a badge system is greatly reduced as well as the problem of point-to-point integration between many siloed

systems. In addition there is the opportunity for Partners in Learning to import badges from other sources so as to illuminate a

more holistic picture of educator achievements and further the ability for personal brand building. Conversely it also enables

the Partners in Learning badges to be consumed by, combined with, and surfaced through the offerings of other members of

the open badges ecosystem.