Transforming Acknowledgment of Achievements through Badging: A System-Wide Initiative to Validate Students' Career-Ready Skills

USM sees great potential in digital badges to help validate and present the career-ready skills our graduates attain that are not well illustrated by a university transcript, resume, and cover letter. The purpose of the USM Digital Badging initiative is to collaboratively explore the feasibility of digital badges, both for students (the badge earners) and for prospective employers (the badge consumers). Project team members will share insights into how we identified the badges to pilot, discuss the design processes used to create the badge criteria and assessments, and address opportunities and barriers encountered along the way.

Outcomes: Outline the process of designing and implementing a collaborative badging initiative *Identify assumptions and establish guiding principles as parameters of operation *Identify possible opportunities and barriers that could arise during a badging initiative and how to respectively leverage and overcome them