I’ll confess, when I first heard about digital badges in the early 2000s, I thought they were kind of silly. I was just starting my career as an instructional systems designer (ISD)—the original title for learning designers. While I had fond memories of my Girl Scout sash, peppered with badges, I didn’t understand why anyone would care about a virtual version of these emblems of achievement.

Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that


