Announcing the 2024 Badge Summit @ CU Boulder
Plus an encore presentation from 2023!
We are excited to announce that the 2024 Badge Summit at CU Boulder will be held in-person August 5–7, 2024. There will also be a Virtual Badge Summit on August 20, 2024.
As a special bonus, we’re also premiering an encore presentation from an all-star presentation at the 2023 conference! Details and the full recording are below👇
Now in its ninth year, the 2024 Badge Summit is a leading gathering to learn about digital credentials and connect with others who are changing the world. The Badge Summit brings together thinkers and doers from K-12, Higher Ed, Industry, Government, Non-Profit, and Cultural institutions for an exciting and impactful conference accessible to both in-person and virtual attendees and presenters.
What to expect
The 9th Badge Summit seeks to build on the successes of previous conferences. Monday morning will kick off with pre-conference workshops, concurrent sessions, catered lunch (included in registration, as with all meals!), afternoon sessions and an opening keynote, followed by a welcome reception. Tuesday features breakfast and lunch, plus a full day of learning and sharing. And we’ve added a third day, with concurrent sessions on Wednesday morning, and in the afternoon the option for a FREE post-conference workshop offering attendees a facilitated opportunity to slow down and dive deep into applying the new ideas and excitement from the conference.
Conference details: https://www.thebadgesummit.com/
The Virtual Badge Summit on August 20, 2024 will include recordings from the in-person event, as well as live and recorded content exclusive to the online gathering. Registration for Virtual Badge Summit is just $100.
What’s new
There are several improvements and changes as the conference evolves to meet participants’ needs. In addition to the expanded day and accompanying content, capacity is increasing to 300 attendees. Our catering is increasing to include more snacks, full breakfasts (instead of continental breakfasts), and all-day coffee. We are also increasing staffing during the Badge Summit to assist with our users’ experience, which will also include a free luggage check!
We are also prototyping enhancements to the call for proposals. One of these is our Presenter Guide to help people proposing sessions to discover possible co-presenters. There are passionate and talented change makers in the Badge Summit community, and while many would be interested in presenting their work and ideas, not all of them have a specific session in mind to propose. Likewise, there are people with worthy proposals, however they may not (yet!) be networked to ideal collaborators to co-present. The Badge Summit Presenter Guide is intended to serve as a platform for community members to include themselves and their interests in co-presenting with others who are seeking co-presenters.
Our other prototype is to invite presenters to nominate themselves pitch feature session topics for which we are inverting the proposal process: rather than submit a session proposal, interested people submit their own interest and qualifications for consideration as co-presenters on predetermined panels addressing topics such as ensuring global perspectives, sharing our failures and missteps, and role-playing as futurists willing to ask, “What if we’re wrong?”
Cost: $349 Early Registration | $449 Regular Registration | $249 Presenter Discount
While registration costs remain more affordable than comparable learning and sharing events, returning attendees will note that pricing has increased. Some of this is due to our commitment to improve catering and staffing. Most is because of inflationary pressures and increases to our overhead costs; producing the Badge Summit is more expensive than it used to be.
Access remains a priority. As such, we will continue to offer need-based scholarships for attendees to request up to the full conference registration amount. Also, one presenter from each session may receive a discount of $249 off the cost of registration.
Check out the Badge Summit @ CU Boulder website for more details, including the call for proposals and registration: https://www.thebadgesummit.com/
Encore Badge Summit Presentation
As a special treat to accompany announcing the 2024 conference, we are premiering an encore session from our 2023 gathering. This was a really special session when it happened in-person and the panelists were generous enough to gather for a reprise recording that we’re excited to share with you here for the first time!
21st Century Skills Through Micro-Credentialing: The Polk County Partnership
This project, a collaboration between Polk County Public Schools, Education Design Lab, and Muzzy Lane is an extraordinary early example of implementing a “real world” credentialing ecosystem for teaching, recognizing, and valuing the 21st Century Skills that actually matter for lifewide learning and earning.
In this pilot (which engaged over 400 high school students as well as area employers), the 21st Century Skills that were named, assessed and credentialed were:
- Critical Thinking
- Oral Communication
- Initiative
We’ve been hearing big talk about this stuff going back to when there was an unwritten rule that every staff meeting must eventually show Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk.
But the fact is, as inspiring as it is to talk about how important this stuff is, it’s hard to actually do anything about it. As important as everyone says these skills are, we rarely see 21st Century Skills credentialed at scale because it’s daunting to reliably assess at scale.
This project succeeds in bringing together the trifecta: Schools, Employers, and Assessment to meaningfully implement an ecosystem of recognizing and valuing students’ 21st Century Skills. Perhaps most impressively, they solved how to assess the skills without leaning on unreliable multiple choice questions or hiring an army of validators. The answer, as you’ll learn in the webinar, is virtual simulations. (You can read more about that aspect in this Open Skills Network post.)
It’s really inspiring work with tons of valuable takeaways for anyone implementing micro-credentials and wondering how to do so meaningfully and with impact. Enjoy!
Thanks for reading. If you liked this post, please click to 👏👏👏 and recommend it to others! If you have thoughts to share about this, I hope to learn from your own response post!
In addition to following Noah Geisel here on Medium, you can find him at SenorG on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Some other posts you might like:
