What are digital badges?
Digital badges are verifiable, portable digital credentials that recognize specific skills, achievements, or competencies. They contain embedded metadata including the issuer, criteria, evidence, and the date earned, making them a trusted and convenient way to showcase learning and accomplishments.
Benefits of Digital Badges
Digital badges offer verifiable, shareable credentials that showcase specific skills and competencies beyond traditional transcripts. They contain embedded metadata that employers can instantly verify, making them more credible than paper certificates.
How to use a Digital Badge
Upon completing a designated course or project, you'll earn a digital badge that can easily be displayed on digital portfolios, or within professional applications to showcase your achievement.
Understanding Badges
Each digital badge is color-coordinated to a set of 5 different skill areas:
Critical Thinking
Intellect, analysis, depth
Badges in this category recognize the ability to reason carefully with information before acting on it. They cover skills like evaluating sources and evidence, diagnosing the root of a problem, interpreting quantitative and qualitative data, assessing AI-generated output, and weighing the ethical consequences of a decision.
Communication
Open, expressive, outward facing
Badges in this category recognize the ability to convey ideas clearly and adapt them to the people receiving them. They cover skills like professional writing, oral presentation, audience-appropriate tone and format, translating technical or numerical information for general audiences, facilitating productive discussion, and giving constructive feedback.
Teamwork
Warmth, connection, team energy
Badges in this category recognize the ability to work well alongside others and strengthen the group in the process. They cover skills like active listening, navigating disagreement, coaching and supporting peers, following through on shared responsibilities, fostering equitable participation, and building trust with stakeholders.
Operational Skills
Reliability, process, structure
Badges in this category recognize the ability to build and follow structure that makes work repeatable. They cover skills like project planning, documenting and mapping processes, prioritizing competing demands, anticipating risk, managing change, and refining work through defined review cycles.
Digital and Technology
Innovation, tech, forward-looking
Badges in this category recognize the ability to keep pace as digital tools change. They cover skills like adopting AI into everyday practice, working confidently inside learning and content platforms, organizing and maintaining data, recognizing digital risks, producing polished multimedia, and meeting accessibility expectations.
Viewing Badges
After receiving a badge, students can add it to their badge wallet and view them in Parchment Badges. This platform allows you to store badges earned through UNK and consolidate other badges into one centralized digital wallet.
Questions? Contact us!
advance@unk.edu
(308) 865-8321
