‘Badges’ Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas
http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/
I think the idea behind this concept is quite valid, provide a way for effort to be recognized (for instance, I have spent huge number of hours helping people on a programming forum but I doubt (other than that almost certainly leading to being chosen as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) it helps me in any job search (I do tend to mention it in my cover letters, though, maybe there is a payoff)). Also, I have studied a huge number of subject quite intently and if I were able to take on-line courses and pass tests that gave me accreditable recognition I might be motivated to complete some areas of study (usually when I find out I have been an idiot for making some invalid assumption I tend to drop the subject, one of the drawbacks about knowing a little about a lot of subjects). I did get certified in one area (actually two, but the second (Scrum Product Owner) was an extension of my employment (and was pretty much a joke anyway)), I became a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), but my personal experience was that effort wasn’t worth a damn (meaning I couldn’t get any jobs in the infosec world despite having it).
However, I see it subject to huge potential for abuse. Unless there was some sort of honest accreditation body that would evaluate what it took to get the badge (and ensured that those requirements didn’t get diluted over time!) and further act as some sort of clearinghouse so someone trying to evaluate the worth of a badge had a one-stop shop, I figure they are totally worthless. Unless you have some widely accepted ‘badge’ (like the CISSP, though by itself it wasn’t worth a damn to me) that the community can agree on (and further, have some sort of way validating it was earned), what is to keep me from charging $5 for whatever badge you think is cool looking that you can add to your resume? I like this quote (there are several nice statements in the article, I highly recommend it):
A world of badges would also create extra work for both job applicants trying to organize and present their badges and to employers trying to judge their actual worth. All badges could seem more flash than substance, like the “flair” worn by the waitress in the movie Office Space.
Bottom line, I am conflicted. The idea has so much potential that I want to champion it, but it is so easy to build a totally meaningless system that I feel without some strong guiding hand it will leap directly into uselessness.
I’ve hired a lot of engineers and I’ll tell you frankly that I completely discounted any certifications (I’m not sure how a certification differs from a certificate). I would certainly ignore any badges.
I completely agree with the statement, “We have to question the tyranny of the degree, …”, but I’m not sure how one sidesteps that tyranny. When it gets down to the final candidates I’ll certainly conduct some evaluations of my own, but how does one narrow the field without wasting tons of time when there may be hundreds of applicants for one opening?
I recall a professor once saying that a certain class (calculus, if I remember correctly) had prerequisites, that the students were presumed to meet them, and that there would be no slowing down or hanging back for those who did not. He lied. The class was pure torture, waiting for him to try to shovel some algebra and trig into idiots that had come from who knows where.
From that moment on I have not trusted the educational system and I fervently consider that it has gone way downhill since then.
I also had a calculus professor who (loudly and often) lamented how unprepared his students were for his class. I am not sure how much I learned in the class otherwise, but I did wind up getting over any fear of calculus (for some reason I had bought into the ‘calculus is hard’ ideology) so I guess in the long run the class was valuable in that, though I have never used any calculus either as a biochemist or programmer.
I think the ideology behind the badges is to be able to quickly narrow down the candidate pool from those who _might_ be qualified from those who are _certainly_ qualified (presuming, naturally, they aren’t lying somehow). Then again, I have submitted myself for positions where I am a 1:1 match with the requested skills, yet never got a call despite the position remaining open, sometimes for months afterward. I have only had to hire people a few times, but I have always been looking at prescreened resumes and not the ‘raw’ material. I have, though, noted that interviews, while useful, are hardly guaranteed to sort out the long-term useful from the useless. Sometimes I suspect that they hire people simply out of exhaustion and if you are lucky enough to be the last one interviewed you probably have a much better chance of getting the job than if you are the first one.
I laughed at your first paragraph. I, too, was inoculated with the notion that calculus was some hugely difficult subject, but that its mastery would amount to the possession of arcane levels of magic.
By the time that I had designed a stable motor-control servo for an intravenous infusion pump, capable of performing over a 1500:1 range without killing the patient, calculus was a triviality on the order of acquiring the ability to perform subtraction.
The concept first appeared on my radar screen 3 days ago, when one of my former colleagues floated a similar idea.
In his words, “As long as the employer believes the issuer of the badge (e.g., Stanford or some other ‘brand name’), your credential is good enough.”
I said, “So it’s like a web of trust.”
He said, “Exactly.”
So here’s why I think your concerns about proliferation of cheap commodity badges and the need for a “clearinghouse” will ultimately not be a problem: Brand names will function, as they always have, to serve as guideposts.
Why in the world do people trust Lay’s potato chips? They are manufactured in probably 15 or 20 different factories, with varying levels of quality control and competence of employees, probably operated by different subcontractors, and yet as far as the customer is concerned, a Lay’s potato chip is the same all around the country. In other words, the owner of the brand name has created enough uniformity (not perfect uniformity, but enough) so that people trust the product clad in the Lay’s packaging.
Each badge issuer will go through a process of getting its brand accepted by a critical mass of employers. Big universities like Stanford will have a huge initial advantage, but that will quickly change as web entrepreneurs can create mindshare, especially in highly specialized areas that the big universities are not nimble enough to respond to.
If it becomes widely known that a certain badge issuer is easily “gamed” or defrauded by people who haven’t really learned the material, or if the criteria for a certain badge are widely known to be a joke, then the Web will take care of making a laughingstock out of that badge issuer.
Frankly, given how easy it is to “game” and defraud the SAT, I’m astonished that SAT scores are still treated as any sort of meaningful credential for college admissions, but they are.
If I were running a big university (or worse yet, a second- or third-tier university), I would be trembling in my boots. WHY IN THE WORLD would anyone pay $200,000 or go deep into debt to get a B.S.? Just accumulate a set of merit badges that some employers are willing to accept, and you’re good to go. For most fields, it would take a lot less than 4 years, and you might even be able to stay sober during your college education to boot, since there wouldn’t be any frat houses to distract you.
K-12 education will be slower to change, since it will always have its important “day care” function, but I can see the merit badge concept spreading there as well.
I think your idea can work, but it creates the typical barriers to entry and good marketing can replace honest value every time. I do agree, though, that non-marquee universities should be very worried about this idea, particularly if so much can be had for free or some nominal cost. I should have emphasized the idea of the community education in my post, I think that is its particular strength. Plus, people who put in a lot of time on a forum (like I do at the DevShed) develop a reputation (fairly honest, I believe) that could be traded on, but that isn’t (yet) a factor in decision making.
Sort of like adding to open source projects as a resume add-on for developers. Add something to the Linux kernel and you are _somebody_, but add something to some obscure project with 2 users and that is far from impressive (though, naturally, doing the latter could entail a great deal more effort and creativity and since it is open source, at least it still acts as independent validation of your capabilities).