After hearing about the digital-badge concept, he began using a system of badges instead of a traditional grading scale to evaluate his graduate students starting in the Spring of 2011.

"I've been surprised by how effective they've been," he says. At the beginning of each class, Halavais equates a certain number of badges with a letter grade, and it is up to his students to earn the number of badges equivalent to the grade they would like in the class.

I believe we need to be very careful in the way we talk about badges. Badges are not assessments. A badge is something you receive after you successfully complete an assessment. The actual assessment could take the form of generic multiple-choice questions, a performance assessment, a portfolio evaluation, a construct-aligned bundle of context-dependent items, or whatever. If the person successfully completes this assessment, then they receive the credential. Badges are not assessments; badges are credentials – badges are things we award to people who pass assessments.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Open Badge project set up by the Mozilla Foundation. It’s a project that I think has enormous potential in education but it’s very much in the developmental stage. Put simply, an Open Badge is a badge that you display on a website or blog or wherever that shows that you have achieved some sort of accreditation from an organisation. That accreditation could simply be a “Star of the Week” award, or something far more involved including achieving set standards on assessments etc. The important bit is that wherever you see a badge displayed the badge links to a web page showing the criteria for awarding the badge, details of the institution that awarded the badge, and a statement asserting the right of that individual to display a badge.  What’s more, because the details about an individual’s badges are held in an independent database, they are portable, i.e. once you’ve left one institution you can bring the badges you earned along with you to the new institution you are enrolled at.