Badging Your Way to Information Literacy

Microcredentialing, or badging, has become a popular way to certify achievement in a variety of fields, perhaps most visibly in information technology. Higher education institutions have started to investigate badges as a way to certify curricular and cocurricular activities and provide a more detailed description of the skills, abilities, and experiences of students as they go through their college years. Microcredentialing also provides an opportunity to assess and recognize student learning outcomes across multiple courses, rather than requiring students to meet complex goals within one course. At the authors’ institution, the College of Technology recently formulated a competencybased degree program that includes information literacy outcomes for students. In order to track student progress, the college decided to use a badging system, and librarians were asked to create and facilitate an information literacy badge for the college’s inaugural course for first-year students. The libraries have also been involved in working with a more conventional, i.e., credit-based, course for first year students in the college, which meets the university’s foundational core curriculum requirements for information literacy. This paper describes the process of developing an information literacy curriculum for a competency-based program and provides a rough comparison of student outcomes between the traditional and competency-based course offerings.