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" Course providers like Udemy and Lynda.com, along with coding boot camps and massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as edX and Coursera, promise to refresh workers' skills or help them acquire expertise they didn't get in college. But those new credentials don't carry much weight in hiring yet, recruiters say, because managers don't trust or recognize many of the companies and organizations behind the badges and courses."

"Courses will be available in "power skills" (e.g. communication), "technical skills" (e.g. IT) and career-advancement skills" (e.g. negotiation). Learners pay $50, $100 or $150 for courses and, upon completion of an assessment, receive printable certificates or digital badges."

Digital badging solution.

The Academy offers a wide variety of STEMx topics offered as online workshops, mini-courses, or "massively open online courses" (MOOC's) that are fun, practical, and engaging. Topics include "Helping students solve community challenges through app design" (offered by AppsforGood.org), "Game Design for Learning" (offered by LearningGamesNetwork.org), "Using Remote Science Labs" (offered by Northwestern University) and more. Educators earn recognition from the host institution and from the HP Catalyst Academy by collecting electronic badges.

"Gamification has several definitions but the one I find most compelling is one that involves elements of games beyond just points, badges and leaderboards. A definition that includes using elements like challenge, story, role-play, feedback-what I call "deeper" game elements."

"How can companies get a better idea of which skills employees and job candidates have? While university degrees and grades have done that job for a long time, they've done it imperfectly. In today's rapidly evolving knowledge economy, badges, nanodegrees, and certificates have aimed to bridge the gap - but also leave a lot to be desired. While HR departments are eager for better "people analytics," that concept is still fuzzy. And simply collecting data is not enough - to be used, data has to be presented usefully."

"More than anything else in the pantheon of modern writing or as the kids call it, content creation, Buzzfeed aims to be hyper-relatable, through visuals! It hopes it can define your exact identity, because only then will you share its URL on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr as some sort of badge of your own uniqueness, immortality. If the first Internet was "Getting information online," the second was "Getting the information organized" and the third was "Getting everyone connected" the fourth is definitely "Get mine." Which is a trap."

"The best way of thinking about the grid is as the areas that we think it's important to pay attention to when teaching others how to read, write and participate on the Web."

"Though there are likely many other issues than covered here, a resourceful start is a classification system based on three primary ethical concerns: shifting powers, archiving the future, and building trust. Likewise, it is noted that the focus on microcredentialing should be as a concept rather than as a specific technology, protocol, or practice."

we'll be offering a free 4-week professional development course designed to help instructors, trainers, and instructional designers learn how to better use social media to support learning, whether in an informal networking sense or by embedding social media into more formal learning contexts. The course will be hosted on Blackboard Coursesites and is open to anyone, anywhere in the world, at no charge.

Every day, students accomplish great things thanks to the opportunities provided by their college or university. They are surpassing expectations, shaping their futures and the world around them. Those accomplishments deserve attention for students and their schools. Attention that proves the value of those experiences and the institutions that make them possible. Attention from decision-makers and media. Attention that drives interest from the people who matter.

"When a college goes out of business, all of its alumni can suddenly find themselves in an unexpected dilemma: How can graduates prove they actually earned their degrees when no one is left at the institution to send academic transcripts to prospective employers or graduate schools? That scenario is one reason that a group of nine universities, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, today announced a collaboration to build a system that would let institutions issue digital diplomas and credentials in a way that can be verified without needing to check with a human registrar. The idea is to encourage widespread use of digital credentials across all kinds of academic institutions, and even at more informal places of learning, so that students end up taking ownership of how to communicate their learning to employers."

"Our mission is to create a trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure that will become the standard for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying academic credentials, digitally."

"Digital student records are evolving in ways that more fully document student achievements. One such form is the Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR), a digital asset that helps students both better understand their learning and share a verifiable record of their knowledge and accomplishments. CLR content can include portfolios, learning artifacts, course descriptions and syllabi, rubrics, performance evaluations, and other materials that help document what a learner knows and can do. The CLR shifts attention away from seat-time metrics to richer measures of an individual's abilities."

"The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and Columbia University Libraries have released the Digital Literacy Competency Calculator (DLCC) on GitHub. The DLCC is a web-based tool for representing the connection between digital literacy competencies and the teaching and learning practices that produce them."

"Canvas integration with new Credly rules engine allows digital credentials to be triggered by completion of Canvas modules, assignments or other important achievement milestones"