Using digital badges as goal-setting facilitators: a multiple case study

Students' goal-setting skills are highly related to their academic learning performance and level of motivation. A review of the literature demonstrated limited research on both applicable goal-setting strategies in higher education and the support of technology in facilitating goal-setting processes. Addressing these two gaps, this study explored the use of digital badges as an innovative approach to facilitate student goal-setting. The digital badge is a digital technology that serves as both a micro-credential and a micro-learning platform. A digital badge is a clickable badge image that represents an accomplished skill or knowledge and includes a variety of metadata such as learning requirements, instructional materials, endorsement information, issue data and institution, which allows the badges to be created, acquired and shared in an online space. In higher education, digital badges have the potential for assisting students by promoting strategic management of the learning process, encouraging persistence and devoted behavior to learning tasks, and improving learning performance. A qualitative multiple case study design (n = 4) was used to answer the research question: how did the undergraduate student participants in this study use digital badges to facilitate their goal-setting process throughout a 16-week hybrid course? Results from this study contribute to understanding how to effectively integrate digital badges to meaningfully improve self-regulated learning in higher education.