I was pleased to see that EdX came through with a certificate of completion as offered for the course I completed in June, Design and Development of Games for Learning. I paid $40 for verification of my identity and a copy of the certificate showing that I completed 100% of the assignments. Of course, you really don’t know anything about my competency in designing games. My personal goal was related to how learning games improve motivation for learning.
Here is the “verified” certificate of completion that I then added to my LinkedIn profile. I’d say that offering a certificate from MIT did improve my motivation for completion of a MOOC.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/EdXMITxCertificate.pdf”]
Congrats Kris, that’s a notable feather in your cap…and it looks probably as official as the NMSU OTLC certificate. As noted elsewhere previously, various ideas about digital portfolios have been floated, so that a live digital transcript of all that one has learned is readily available.
As you note, certification and accreditation are not the same as demonstration of skills or knowledge or what was actually learned, so there’s room for a lot of progress there.
And there’s LinkedIn who presently has a sort of digital portfolio, although we all know that the “recommends for skills” method is less than rigorous in assessment. Often, it’s “oh yeah, I know that person, think I’ll give them a recommend and maybe they’ll give me one.”