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Tag: Education

Levelling up?

I’ve spent 13 years now interested in Open Badges and, more recently, Verifiable Credentials.* When you explain something over and over again you get better at explaining it. You also start to notice patterns. This post is about one of those patterns.

* Happily, v3.0 of the Open Badges specification uses the Verifiable Credentials data model. Find out more.

Define something worth learning, build a curriculum and scheme of work, then design some learning activities. Create an assessment based on the learning activities, and then issue credentials based on the outcome of the activities.
Image CC BY-NC Visual Thinkery

In broad brushstrokes, credentials are awarded in a similar way within academic systems. Define something worth learning, build a curriculum and scheme of work, then design some learning activities. Create an assessment based on the learning activities, and then issue credentials based on the outcome of the activities.

We’re so used to this that we forget that this is very far removed from how the world actually works. Learning outside of the classroom is messy, episodic, and relational. So how do we go about capturing this?


A common mental model I’ve seen is using gold, silver, and bronze as ‘tiers’ within a badging system. However, without a background in assessment design, these tiers often become even more arbitrary than those in formal education. There’s often a huge ask even to get on the bottom rung of the ladder. Why? I’d just give people badges for turning up. They’re free! You can issue as many as you like.

At Mozilla, where I also served as Web Literacy Lead, we aimed to link the Web Literacy Map to badges, and initially considered levels. However, we quickly realised that doing this globally in a decentralised way is essentially impossible. Instead, mapping badges to skills in specific areas made much more sense. Context matters: what might be ‘advanced’ in one place could be ‘beginner’ elsewhere.

Instead, mapping badges related to skills in a particular area made much more sense. Context does, after all, matter: what might be seen as ‘advanced’ somewhere might be seen as ‘beginner’ elsewhere, and vice-versa. Badges for levels are all well and good, but those levels need to describe something worthwhile.

After leaving Mozilla, I spent all my consultancy time with City & Guilds , collaborating extensively with Bryan Mathers (who created the images in this post). Even as an awarding body, it took City & Guilds staff a while to grasp all the possibilities badges offered.

Image CC BY-NC Visual Thinkery

Bryan created this super-simple taxonomy from our conversations as a conversation starter with City & Guilds staff, helping them realise that recognition in the form of participation in something, or membership of a thing, was just as legitimate as reaching a defined standard or demonstrating excellence. Badges help us tell a story about the learning journey we’ve been on.

For me, this has been one of the main takeaways from my own learning journey with Open Badges so far: when you’ve got enough verified ways of showing what you’ve done, levels don’t matter that much. We’re all different, so recognising and celebrating that is, to me, more important than expecting everyone to fit into pre-defined boxes.

So if you’re designing assessments based on academic research for something that’s high stakes then, by all means, design a rigorous system. For everything else, treat it like a product: figure out how your users (the people to be badged) want to be recognised, design around that, and iterate.


If you’re curious in how to go beyond the ‘microcredential’ approach to digital credentials, you might be interested in the free WAO email-based course Reframing Recognition. You’re also welcome to join us as part of the Open Recognition is for Everybody community.

Using AI to help solve Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem

Three curved lines showing performance. There are two standard deviations (i.e. two sigma) between Conventional Learning and 1:1 Tutoring.

Imagine we’re all surfers. The ocean we’re in is the educational system, and we’re all trying to ride the wave of knowledge to the shore of understanding. Some of us have master surfers as guides – personal tutors who are right there with us, helping us manoeuvre the currents and ride high on the knowledge wave. They know our strengths, they know our fears, and they ensure we don’t wipe out. These fortunate few reach the shore faster, more smoothly and often with a lot more fun.

Then there are the rest of us. We’re in a giant surf class. There’s one instructor and dozens of us learners. The instructor is doing their best, but they can’t give us all the personalised attention we need. Some of us catch the wave, some of us don’t. This is Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem.

Brought to the fore by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom in the 1980s, the Two Sigma Problem highlights a gap in education. Personal tutoring can propel students’ performance by two standard deviations – like moving from the middle of a class right to the top 2%. The problem is, we can’t give everyone a personal tutor. It’s just not feasible. So, the question is, how do we give each student the benefits of one-on-one instruction, at scale?


Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, in particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. I’ve been experimenting with using ChatGPT as a tutor for my son during the revision period for his exams. It’s great at coming up with questions, marking them, and suggesting how to improve. This kind of feedback is absolutely crucial to learning. It’s also great at exploring the world and allowing curiosity to take you in new directions.

So, if we revisit the Two Sigma Problem based on what’s possible with LLMs, it looks like there’s a possible solution with multiple advantages:

  1. Personalisation: Like a master surfer guiding us through the waves, AI offers individualised instruction. It can adapt to each learner’s pace, skill level, and areas of interest. It’s like your own personal Mr. Miyagi, providing the right lesson at the right time. Wax on, wax off.
  2. 24/7 Availability: With AI, it’s always high tide. The learning doesn’t stop when the school bell rings. Whether it’s the middle of the day or the middle of the night, your AI tutor is there to help, guide, and explain.
  3. Scalability: One-to-one tutoring might not be feasible, but AI makes one-to-one-to-many a reality. An AI tutor doesn’t get exhausted or overbooked. It can help an unlimited number of students at once, ensuring everyone gets the ride of their lives on the knowledge wave.
  4. Feedback and Assessment: Picture a surf instructor who can instantly replay your wipeouts, showing you exactly what went wrong and how to fix it. That’s what AI can do. It provides immediate feedback, helping learners understand and correct their mistakes right away.
  5. Enhanced Resources: LLMs are like a treasure trove of knowledge. Trained on a vast array of educational content, they’re like having the British Library at your fingertips, ready to generate explanations, examples, and answers on a multitude of topics.
  6. Removing Bias: AI doesn’t care about your background, your accent, or the colour of your board shorts. When designed and trained properly, it treats all learners equally, providing a level playing field.

No technology is a silver bullet. As an educator, I know that while curiosity and feedback is really important, there’s nothing like another human providing emotional input — including motivation. AI is here to support, not replace, our human guides.

Even though it’s early days, we’re already seeing some really interesting developments in the application of LLMs in education. I’m no fan of Microsoft, but I will acknowledge that a feature they have in development called ‘passage generation’ looks interesting. This tool reviews data to create personalised reading passages based on the words or phonics rules a student finds most challenging. Educators can customise the passage, selecting suggested practice words and generating options, then publish the passage as a new reading assignment. I find this kind of thing really useful in Duolingo for learning Spanish. Context matters.

As a former teacher, I know how important prioritisation can be for the limited amount of time you have with each student. And as a parent, I’m a big believer in the power of deliberate practice for getting better at all kinds of things. Freeing up teachers to be more like coaches than instructors has been the dream ever since someone came up with the pithy phrase “guide on the side, not sage on the stage”.


One of the main concerns I think a lot people have with AI in general is that it will “steal our jobs”. I’d point out here that the main problem here isn’t AI, it’s capitalism. Any tool or system be used for good or for ill. If you’re not sure how we can approach this post-scarcity world, I’d recommend reading Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani. Of course, regulation is and should be an issue, too.

The main issue I see with this is centralised LLMs run by companies running opaque models and beholden to shareholders. That’s why I envisage educational institutions running local LLMs, or at least within a network that only connects to the internet when it needs to. Just as Google Desktop used to allow you to search through your local machine and the web, I can imagine us all having an AI assistant that has full context, while preserving our privacy.


So the way to approach any new tool or service is to ask critical questions such as “who benefits?” but also to fully explore what’s possible with all of this. I’m hugely hopeful that AI won’t lead us into a sci-fi dystopia, but rather help to even out the playing field when it comes to human learning and flourishing.

What do you think? I’d love to hear in the comments!


Image remixed from an original on the SkillUp blog. Text written with the help of ChatGPT (it’s particularly good at coming up with metaphors, I’ve found!)

Reimagining assessment practices using AI tools

Last week, I replied to someone who was concerned that AI tools such as ChatGPT meant students might not learn to ‘think for themselves’. When I responded that, as a parent and former teacher, I would hope that this means reimagining assessment practices, they asked what I meant. I explained, and they said they hadn’t thought about it like that.

So I thought I’d quickly capture the points I made in that thread so I can easily refer to them again in future.

If we zoom out and think about what we’re doing when we’re trying to help people learn things, then we need to know:

  1. Where learners are currently at in terms of their current knowledge and skills
  2. Where we want them to be at in terms of those knowledge and skills
  3. What they’re interested in learning and how they’re interested in doing so

The third of these is usually sacrificed for the sake of efficiency (think: large classrooms). However, the crux of learning is feedback, and the more personalised the better. I’ve been using ChatGPT with my son for revision purposes, and it can be used as an excellent tutor, giving precise feedback.

So when we’re talking about reimagining assessment practices, we’re really talking about personalising learning in a way that allows individuals to achieve their own goals, as well as those that society wants them to achieve.

The SAMR model by Ruben Puentadura

Right now, we’re augmenting an existing system using new tools. Hence the worry about exams and essays. But once we go back to what we’re trying to achieve here, we’ll realise that AI and other new technologies allow us to personalise learning and provide tighter feedback loops. Which was the point all along! 😄

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