While there is probably no country in Europe that does not stress in their educational and employment policies the importance of digital competence of their citizens, the reality 

Background and motivation: need to improve the chances to get a good job among vocational school leavers; new kind of digital competence might help

Key concepts: digital competence, self-directed and collaborative learning, evidence-based e-portfolio, open badges

Research problem: how to enhance the learning of digital skills for job market with open badges among vocational students?

Research questions: badge system design, role of badges, balance between openness and structure

Structure of the paper

Vocational school graduates: disadvantaged group in the job market in the digital age (Jaanika)

Digital competence needed on the job market: beyond ECDL (Mart)

Samsung Digi Pass project: aims, target group, program, implementation (Jaanika)

Samsung Digi Pass was a digital skills training programme for vocational school students, organised in cooperation of Tallinn University, Samsung Electronics Baltics and Estonian National Youth Council. The first iteration of the programme was carried out from September to December 2016. The participants had to apply to the programme by filling in an online application form about their background (specialisation, school, age etc.), ICT skills and preliminary idea for a digital project that they would work on during the programme. The main aim was to recruit teams of three, but also single members were accepted if they agreed to the group proposed by the organiser. Out of 48 applicants, the jury chose 30  young people to participate in the programme (there were three drop-outs in the beginning of the programme and 1 drop-out in the middle of the programme, so that the final number of graduates was 26). The programme consisted of four face-to-face training days in Tallinn and independent tasks and project work in-between the training days. Each participant set up a blog on the first day, where they reflected on their training experience and documented most of their independent tasks. Each team had a mentor with background in educational technology who helped to keep the team on track with their tasks and project work. For each task, the participants had to present some kind of evidence in digital format (e.g. a blog post, a photo, a mock-up etc), for which they received an open badge depending on the quality of the work.

It has been stated crucial, that understanding digital competence can not be reduced to a single component, nor can it be assessed with just one type of test (Calvani, Cartelli, Fini, Ranieri 2008). Their digital competence framework definition proposes  four dimensions - technological, cognitive, ethical and integrated. Some digital competence models concentrate more on technical skills (ECDL, e-CF) thus lack the cognitive, ethical and integrated component. DigCOMP and ISTE succeed to cover all four dimensions but fail to propose instruments to assess digital competence.

Estonian industries state that vocational workforce before all lack motivation and general skills after graduating and entering the job market. Research show that the lack of social skills and the lack of interest in vocational school leavers career opportunities terrifies the industry and it has been suggested to be fixed as a priority. (Kutseharidus ja muutuv tööturg, 2013)

OECD research PIIAAC found that spending more time using ICT does not necessarily mean having good ICT skills needed to succeed at the job market. Their skills need to be developed by widening the range of activities. 

Using open badge systems has been found to have good impact on developing students motivation through self-monitoring, self-management and self-directed learning. Designing carefully open badge systems also allow assessment through adding value to badges (Põldoja, Jürgens, Laanpere 2016). Their research found that open badge system which enables students to gain control over their learning and plan their learning progress can be extremely motivating. Open badge systems allow assessing variety of soft and hard skills that can be proven by open badge metadata and collected in ePortfolio as evidence. Competence based e-porfolios are considered promising in the employment and process by Estonian HR managers (Tammets; Laanpere 2014).

Design-based research (Mart)

Two iterations (2016 & 2017) (Mart)

Sample in the first round: 27 youngsters, their professions and backgrounds (Jaanika)

The 27 young people who started the programme came from six different vocational schools. In most cases, all the team members were from the same school and studied the same profession; only the three teams formed by the organisers were less homogeneous so that at least one team member came from a different school and/or studied a different profession. Altogether, there were students of 10 different professions: (junior) software developer (8 students), junior IT-systems specialist (5 students), technician of electronic devices (4 students), 3D-designer-artist (3 students), logistics (3 students), cook (2 students), electrician (1 student), ballerina (1 student). At the start of the programme, most of the students (21) were 16-17 years old, four students were 18 years old and one student was 15 years old.

Data collection: badges, posts, profiles, prototypes, self-assessment, survey (Jaanika)

Badge system design for SDP (Mart, Hans)

Data: statistics and overview of issued badges, produced posts, profiles, prototypes (Jaanika)

Altogether, 88 silver badges and 67 gold badges were issued during the programme. The least badges were issued for the "fix-it" competency (3 badges - most likely due to the fact that it was awarded for an optional task), the most badges (equally 26 badges in each category) were issued for the competencies "collaborate", "share" and "improve-it". The largest number of badges that a participant could earn during the programme was 9 - this was achieved by two participants. The smallest number of badges earned during the programme was 3 - this number of badges was earned by three participants.

As each participant had a blog which served as their e-portfolio, 27 blogs with altogether 170* posts were created during the programme. These posts included participants' reflections on the training sessions as well as independent tasks (e.g. digital safety audit of someone's home).

In addition to blogging tasks, each team had to work on their own digital project, resulting in a (not yet functional) prototype of a mobile application, website or similar. Thus, by the end of the programme, nine such prototypes were created by the teams. All the prototypes were presented by the teams at the final event of the programme to a jury who selected the winner of the programme by taking into account both the project results as well as badges collected by each team during the programme. 

Self-assessment & feedback survey (Mart)

Design guidelines for the second iteration

The team of researchers cteam collected digital competence self-assessment reports from the participants of Samsung Digi Pass programme both in the beginning and in the end of the project. While in the first contact day we were able to get responses from 25 youngsters (out of 27) to our online questionnaire, only 13 of them submitted their responses after the final event. Below is a short summary of the responses. Figure 1 shows the improvement of self-reported average level of nine digital skills of 13 participants before (blue) and after (red) the project activities. The names of the respondents have been replaced with letters A, B etc in order to maintain anonymity. All respondents have reported significant increase of the skill level.