Abstract:

After the reform of vocational education and training sector in Finland there rise a need to focus on vocational teachers’ new competences related. The national project called “Teacher’s open badges” explored the needed competences collaboratively by all vocational teacher education institutes in Finland. Open badges as instruments to recognize competences is contained in the project. Open badges are digital information storages that include information of a certain competence; learning objectives, assessment criteria, skills demonstration instructions and earner’s evidence of competence. Open badges are digital micro credentials and applicants demonstrate their skills via authentic educational providers’ context. It is possible to structure studies by open badge-driven learning process and it have been discovered that scaffolding students appears effectively then. One of the project pilots concerned vocational student teaches’ research, development, and innovation (RDI) competence that was designed by the open badge-driven learning process. Online learning material was created and students decided themselves if they needed to study it. In all three themes (information search, scientific writing, working in RDI projects) they applied open badges via badge management system (Open Badge Factory) by demonstrating their skills in a digital format. Finally, a meta badge collected all earned badges and “RDI competence of vocational teacher” was issued. The data was collected through online survey (n=26) from student teachers in spring 2019 right after the piloting period. The results revealed that student teachers found open badges useful for showing one’s competence for job application purposes and they attached earned open badges (RDI competence) into their ePortfolios as well as shared badges also in other digital environments. In addition, student teachers expressed that they want to have specific teacher’s competences recognized by open badges, such as assessment and working as an online teacher that are not mentioned especially in the formal certification. The future recommendation is to consider topics of skills demonstrations via competence themes.

Keywords:

Vocational teacher's competence, open badges, open badge-driven learning.