The Oregon Center for Digital Learning is a non-profit 501(c)3 dedicated to promoting the use of digital micro-credentials and education technology innovations in Oregon.
Our initial focus is on the development of an ecosystem of open digital badges for students and professionals. An open digital badge ecosystem allows learners of all ages to showcase achievements and demonstrate workforce readiness while keeping the data in the hands of the learner.
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Building the infrastructure for a robust open badge ecoysystem in Oregon.
A digital badge can be thought of as an electronic representation of a printed certificate. Like printed certificates, you can use digital badges in a wide variety of ways.
Badges are commonly used to represent skill-based achievements in both academic and non-academic settings, but they can also be used to represent credentials obtained as part of continuing education and professional licensing requirements.
Schools and institutions of all kinds are looking for ways to capture and document a learners' participation and skill acquisition in and out of the classroom. Digital badges give these organizations a vehicle to communicate various types of data about learning, proficiency, and assessment in one form, standardized, across all kinds of issuers.
At the same time, employers need to have a more granular view of an individual's skills and a vehicle by which they can fine-tune the skills they want to see in the workforce. Digital badges allow employers to differentiate candidates more readily - and allow candidates to build a well-rounded picture of their skills and achievements.
Several groups have tried to address these needs by creating proprietary standards for digital badges, but these efforts have failed to gain traction because the badges aren't portable - they have no use outside of the badge issuer's system.
To address this problem, the Mozilla Foundation, in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, created an open technical standard and free software to make it simple for any organization to create, transfer, and verify digital badges. This standard made it possible to create systems where credential information is both easily portable and can be owned by the credential earner. Since the 2011 launch, there has been a groundswell of interest in the Open Badges standard and it is rapidly becoming the lingua franca for digital credentials.
As part of this movement, the Oregon Center for Digital Learning was founded to build the infrastructure needed to create a robust open badge ecosystem in Oregon. The Center's primary mission is to create and pilot technology systems which will benefit Oregon and which can then be reproduced in other states and eventually around the world.
Examples of needed infrastructure and technology systems OCDL plans to provide include: a secure badge archival location and a badge reader website with tools such as an auto-designer, an arranger; and badge kits. Some of these tools are currently in their prototype phase at the Oregon Center for Digital Learning.
As part of our pilots we plan to develop youth advisory groups to help us design and implement badge systems in a way that is relevant and useful to the young people they are designed to serve. We believe in learning systems designed by learners.
As part of our efforts, we recently launched the Oregon Badge Alliance along with our initial partners.
The Oregon Badge Alliance serves as a nexus for discussion among educators, education agencies, industry leaders and technology groups who are working together to empower our youth and workforce.
Wayne's background spans the technology gamut – from hardware design to software architecture. He is passionate about education and emerging technologies. A voracious learner from a young age, Wayne has spent many years pioneering the cutting edges of technology. As founder of Concentric Sky, Wayne leads a team of hand-selected professionals designing and building a wide range software products – from high-focus, individualized K-6 software, to large-scale analytics systems designed to quantify the activity of user populations.
Beth has a long history of work with both public and private schools. She was an Oregon school board member, and a founding member of Abiqua School, an independent K- 8 school in Salem, Oregon. Beth also acted as the regional manager for the SMART (Start Making A Reader Today) literacy program. In 2005 Beth became the first Director of the Oregon Afterschool Network, OregonASK. This network is a collaboration of public and private partners seeking to improve the quality, sustainability and system support for all out-of- school time programs in Oregon. Beth believes that OregonASK will go beyond that to help change existing state policies and create a statewide vision for how we care for children and youth.
A world-renowned specialist in computational thinking, Kiki was named one of Lane County's 20 rising stars under the age of 40 for the year 2013. She is the Executive Director of Thinkersmith and a former computer science instructor at the University of Oregon. In addition, Kiki writes for the Huffington Post and has graced the cover of Open For Business magazine.
Hank is a Research Associate Professor and Director of the Center on Teaching and Learning at the University of Oregon. He currently serves as Principal Investigator or co-Principal Investigator on ten federally-sponsored research and development grants studying the feasibility and efficacy of early reading and early math curricula and interventions. Most recently, Hank has secured and directed several grants to develop a series of learning games targeting whole number concepts and skills.
Laura came to the Oregon University System Chancellor's Office in 2013 to lead statewide efforts to bring industry and higher education together to address critical workforce and applied research needs. Ms. McKinney currently serves as Executive Director for the Engineering Technology Industry Council (ETIC), which advises the state on investments in post-secondary and professional education to meet urgent industry needs. Other initiatives include nurturing the nascent Northwest Collaboratory for Sustainable Manufacturing and fostering a statewide higher education healthcare workforce initiative.
As Vice-President of Concentric Sky, Cale focuses on enterprise software development and mobile development. He leads projects for partners such as Cengage Learning, Encyclopedia Britannica and National Geographic. Cale's passion for technology, extensive management experience, and industry experience are an asset to any project he's involved in.
Please contact us to speak about how you or someone you know might want to be involved.