Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges Partners with Concentric Sky on Digital Badging Initiative
OLYMPIA, Wash. (PRWEB) July 06, 2018 -- The Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges (SBCTC) has partnered with Concentric Sky to use Badgr to implement the college system’s digital badging initiative, a way of showing professional development accomplishments. This 4-year partnership will support all 34 community and technical colleges in Washington State as they implement digital badges and Guided Pathways.
SBCTC plans to offer professional development credentials to faculty, administrators, and professional staff at all 34 of Washington State’s community and technical colleges, as well as to high school teachers involved in transitioning students from high school into college. Each college will have the ability to implement badging and pathways within their courses or programs in order to serve both staff and students. Currently identified programs include internships, community service, STEM activities at science museums, and other co-curricular activities that currently cannot be represented on transcripts. In addition to offering programs via Badgr, SBCTC will also become a contributor to the Badgr open source project.
“Concentric Sky’s leadership in developing open standards and their deep domain knowledge in education makes them a natural partner for us,” said Steve Gance, policy analyst at SBCTC. “The open source nature of Badgr is very attractive to us and we’re looking forward to helping further develop the platform for the benefit of our colleges.”
The Badgr platform is one of the world’s leading digital badging systems, issuing millions of Open Badges on behalf of over 10,000 organizations around the world. Badgr Pathways allows badges from any Open Badges compliant platform to be stacked together into competency-based learning pathways, which can be shared across institutions. Learners have an easy-to-understand map view of where they are in a pathway, and both badges and pathways can be easily integrated into LinkedIn profiles for employer discoverability.
“Higher Education is evolving rapidly to put increased emphasis on student success and career readiness. Partnerships like this allow us to further advance groundbreaking technology standards and provide faculty, administrators, and students with the tools they need to succeed together,” said Wayne Skipper, Founder and CEO of Concentric Sky.
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About the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges coordinates and directs Washington state’s system of 34 public community and technical colleges. Each year, over 370,000 students train for the workforce, prepare to transfer to a university, gain basic math and English skills, or pursue continuing education via our colleges.
For more information about the SBCTC, visit http://www.sbctc.edu
About Concentric Sky
Founded in 2005, Concentric Sky is an award winning software design & development firm located in Eugene, Oregon. Concentric Sky creates top-tier software solutions for a wide variety of prominent organizations around the world including The World Bank, The United Nations, Intel, National Geographic and Encyclopedia Britannica.
For more information about Concentric Sky, visit http://www.concentricsky.com
Kim Hammond, Concentric Sky, http://www.concentricsky.com, +1 (541) 342-8456, [email protected]
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