The Usefulness of Digital Badges in Higher Education – Exploring the Student Perspectives

Many of today’s student cohort entering higher education (HE) have never known life without the Internet. By the time students enter HE many have been exposed to playing digital games considering it as a very useful learning... [ view full abstract ]

Many of today’s student cohort entering higher education (HE) have never known life without the Internet. By the time students enter HE many have been exposed to playing digital games considering it as a very useful learning tool. However, utilising gamification for student engagement and student learning in HE has not been investigated thoroughly and this paper attempts to contribute to this ‘emerging field of study’ as suggested by Gibson et al. (2015) and Reid et al. (2015). An online questionnaire was distributed to two undergraduate student cohorts at University College Dublin's College of Business investigating the usefulness of adopting digital badges for student learning and engagement. Results insinuate that incorporating digital badges into a module indeed improves student learning and engagement while it motivates students to continuously engage with module content throughout the semester and not only during schedules class times.

Keywords: digital badges, gamification, learning, milestones

Gibson, D., Ostashewski, N., Flintoff, K., Grant, S., & Knight, E. (2015). Digital badges in education. Education and Information Technologies, 16, 403-410.

Reid, A.J., Paster, D. and Abramovich, S., 2015. Digital badges in undergraduate composition courses: effects on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Computers in Education, 2(4), pp.377-398.