Digital Badging presentation

What is Digital Badging? 

Digital badges show evidence of your professional development.

How do I earn a digital badge? 

You can earn badges by participating in specific University workshops and trainings. Important benefits to receiving digital badges for specialized training and experience include:

  • Certification: a digital badge shows potential employers that you have up-to-date and relevant skills.
  • Validation:digital badge verifies your participation in a workshop or training on your resume or CV.
  • Transparency: future employers can learn key details about the content of the training and experience.

How are digital badges issued?

  • The University of Minnesota has partnered with Acclaim by Credly to offer digital badges. Credly is a leading digital credential service provider. Digital credentials are hosted by a third party and are verified, secure, portable, and data-rich representations of demonstrated skills and earned certifications.
  • As a Credly Verified Issuer, the Graduate School will publicly issue all earned badges via Credly. When you earn a badge you will receive an email notification of your achievement. If you don’t have a Credly account, you will be prompted to create one after you accept and share or post your digital badge.

Digital Badges Offered by the Graduate School

Maroon Digital Badge

Maroon Badge

Participation
  • Attend and participate in one 2-hour workshop, or a series of 90-minute workshops.
Assessment 
  • Complete and pass a series of post-workshop assessments, evaluated by the workshop facilitator(s), or
  • Write a 500-1000 word reflection paper evaluated by the workshop facilitators(s).
Gold Digital Badge

Gold Badge

Participation
  • Attend and participate in one 4-hour workshop, or a series of 90-minute workshops.
Assessment
  • Create an outward-facing presentation, video, or document that demonstrates the skills and knowledge acquired from the workshop, evaluated by workshop facilitator(s). 

Additional Badge-Eligible Opportunities

Teaching Assistant and Postdoc Professional Development Program Badge

The Teaching Assistant and Postdoc Professional Development Program Badge from the Center of Education Innovation (CEI) is evidence that you have invested in teaching-related professional development. Those that complete the program will learn about timely pedagogical topics pertaining to course design, delivery strategies, assessment and assignments, learning sciences, and contemporary issues impacting learners.

Participants will be offered the badge upon completion of the program requirements:

  • Attend 6 one-hour webinars or workshops in each of the following categories: Learning & Learners, Course Design, Delivery Strategies, and Assignments & Assessments in addition to two electives. 
  • Capstone activity: Student Feedback Facilitation and consultation, or a teaching observation with consultation, or a 2-3 page written reflective essay.

Register for the Teaching Assistant Professional Development Program

GeoSpatial Skills - Storytelling Badge

Use this GeoSpatial Skills Badge from U-Spatial as evidence that you have been trained on introductory skills in web GIS and storytelling using Esri applications. Through a combination of lectures and hands-on activities, participants are introduced to designing and sharing online maps using Esri’s ArcGIS Online software. Topics include preparing data for use, online data sources, map design, spatial analysis, and effective storytelling. 

Participants will:

  • Build GIS software competency with Esri ArcGIS Online and StoryMaps
  • Understand basic GIS tools for finding and managing spatial data resources
  • Experience different types of spatial analysis
  • Develop skills in visualization of spatial data and create meaningful maps
  • Configure a web-based application by combining multimedia elements into a comprehensive story map

Register here

High Performance Computing User Badge

The High Performance Computing (HPC) User Badge is evidence that you have learned the necessary skills to make use of the HPC resources at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute provides advanced research computing infrastructure to the UMN’s research and scholarly community with the goal to advance research, accelerate progress, and promote innovation and discoveries through cutting-edge technologies, scientific computing, informatics and application development. 

Participants will learn how to:

  • Connect to remote cyberinfrastructure resources
  • Schedule compute jobs on shared resources
  • Get started with a command line interface (CLI)

Register for HPC User Badge Courses